herbiehancock

  As a little girl, I remember how my Mom liked to bake year round, but between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, she was in a baking frenzy.  She baked batch after batch of cookies of all kinds.  She made rolled and sliced refrigerator cookies, drop cookies like chocolate chip and peanut butter, cut-out sugar cookies, and cookies shaped like trees and wreaths and stars made with a cookie press and decorated with colored sugars.  She made nut balls, cinnamon snicker doodles , miniature pecan tarts , date pinwheels , chocolate coconut filled cookies, and M&M cookies. For Christmas each year, she also made several different kinds of candy.  She made chocolate-covered cherries, million dollar fudge with walnuts in it, buckeyes , peanut brittle, and pink divinity made from strawberry or raspberry flavored powdered Jello gelatin mix.  There were some years when she also made chocolate covered coconut candy from mashed potatoes and chocolate covered mint ...

We put up our Christmas tree this weekend as you can see in the picture above.  Doing so brought back memories of putting up the tree at home with my family when I was a child.  The following paragraphs relate some of those memories. When I was a kid, the Christmas season began when my Dad went up in the attic above our garage and hauled down the big brown cardboard box that held the artificial Christmas tree.   We assembled and put up that tree every year.  He'd bring the box in to the living room where we had already moved the furniture around to make room for the tree.  Mom always wanted the tree in front of the window so that the lights from it could be seen from outside.  We'd put the naked, green, wooden pole (that looked like a broom handle and that served as the tree trunk) into the tree stand and screwed it in tight.  Then Dad would sort out the branches by size and by the colors painted on the stems.   Every year during this proces...

Father Christmas I've been posting over the last several days about Christmas traditions from my family ancestry. The last two countries I wanted to post about are England and Ireland. Their Christmas customs and traditions are very similar to each other and many are the same ones we have here in the United States. I did learn some interesting tidbits about their holiday customs though, so I will share them with you here. Christmas in England The following background information about Christmas in England came from this site . "The first ever Christmas card was posted in England in the 1840s, and the practice soon became an established part of the build-up to Christmas. Over a billion Christmas cards are now sent every year in the United Kingdom, many of them sold in aid of charities." "Popular among children at Christmas time are pantomimes: song and dance dramatisations of well-known fairy tales which encourage audience participation. ...