Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…
Well, there’s no goose… I was just singing that old song,
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat Please put a penny in the old man’s hat…
Last week, I heard an Aussie version of Jingle Bells on the radio which I thought was really cool. It went something like,
Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way,
Christmas in Australia on a stinking summer’s day!
Oh, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Christmas is really beaut!
Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden ute!
Before things start getting crazy over here, I thought I’d take a moment to wish you all Merry Christmas! Thank you for being a great bunch of readers, commenters, emailers, eaters, and lovers of food!
I spent this morning baking dried-cranberry shortbread hearts, using the recipe from my Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies magazine (the recipe is also available online here). It’s a very easy recipe to follow – only thing I don’t like about the recipe is that because you bake the dough and then cut the hearts out of it, you (obviously!) can’t re-roll the surplus cooked dough bits – luckily, Jac’s been eating them!
The boxes you see here in the photo with the tinsel on top contain shortbread hearts. They are temporarily Glad Wrapped to help maintain freshness before being given to people tomorrow (without Glad Wrap, of course! In the boxes, they are sitting on grease-proof paper and tissue wrap, all fancy-like :)).
Tomorrow, our friend MT is coming over to catch up over lunch, and in the evening we’ll be celebrating Christmas with my family at my brother’s newly renovated home. My brother (who was tukang sate for satay night) and his wife are putting on Christmas dinner as their gift to the family and judging by the sneak preview menu, it will be a feast! My parents’ friends from Malaysia will be there too, so it should be good fun (especially if we can get the Uncle A, the bawdy song jukebox started!) But even before dinner, I must remember to make the trifle that we are taking along to Dunsborough on Christmas Day…
…Yep, on Christmas morning, Jac, VR and I will be getting into the car and heading to Dunsborough for Christmas with Jac’s family. A friend of ours will be looking in on the cats and making sure they’re ok, fed and watered. I’ve already made the port wine jelly for the trifle, and the esky will be loaded up with ice and packed firmly for safe transportation of the trifle on the couple of hours’ journey to Dunsborough. We will be staying there only a couple of nights, so I don’t envisage a detailed travelogue a la Geraldton, but hopefully the Dunsborough Bakery will be trading on one of the days that we are there so I can have a pie for breakfast (and share that with you, of course!)
And so, Merry Christmas from me, Jac, Billy Lee and Pixel! I look forward to reading about your Christmasses on your blogs, and if you don’t have a blog, feel free to tell me about yours in comments or emails. :)
I’ll be back hopefully sometime after the 28th with lots of Christmas foody goodies to share!