Mince Pie Madness

I know, the holidays are well and truly over, so call me crazy for sharing all my holiday stuff now. But i have some time on my hands today and I starting going through our cameras and importing all our pictures from the past couple of months and discovered a lot of forgotten photos that I had taken with the intention of writing a post and amidst the bustle of the holidays I didn't get around to it. So I was going to do a post today about ideas for keeping warm in the coldest months, but I'm going to put that one on hold and share some of the fun I got up to over Christmas instead.
In the months leading up to Christmas, one of our favourite weekly programs is The Great British Bake Off. It always gets me and hubby wishing that we could bake something, and with Christmas approaching we saw our chance to have our of bake off at home. We decided that we wanted to make our own mince pies, but we couldn't agree on a recipe, so in order to avoid an argument and have a little fun, we decided to have a competition to see who could make the best mince pies. We chose our recipes in secret and purchased our ingredients (and a bun tin) and set to it. I chose a Mary Berry recipe (I figured she's the baking queen, so it would be a sure advantage. Tom chose a recipe with rum in it, because he likes rum and any food with rum in it must be better for it in his view. We set to work, albeit in our chosen forms of sleepwear ( I promise he's got boxers on under that apron). The results were probably not Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood standard, but both were tasty (mine were best in a totally unbiased taste test conducted by myself) and we ate them so fast that no one else got to try any. Mostly though it was just a good messy bit of holiday fun. I think we may make it a holiday tradition and do it every year.

Another holiday baking tradition that I have carried on from my family back in the states is making Christmas Bread. My mom makes this every year and we have it for breakfast on Christmas morning. I come from a family of six, so a large loaf is required to see us all through till dinnertime, so this thing is huge. It's an enriched  sweetbread made with eggs, milk and sugar with aniseed mixed in for flavouring, a Greek recipe in origin I believe (thus the cross at the top). I can't ever get it to rise quite right, but this year was my best attempt so far, i managed to get it cooked evenly all the way through and it sure was tasty.
On the crafting front I didn't do much this year, we were so busy in the build up that I just didn't manage to get around to it. But I will share one of my favourite crafted items that I dig out of the Christmas box every year. My grandma knits, it's something she's done as far back as I can remember, I don't know what it is she knitted most of the time, but she'd sit down and watch tennis or wheel of fortune and get out her needles and click away. Now whenever there is a new addition to the family (be it by birth or marriage) she knits them a Christmas stocking, complete with their name on it so they don't get mixed up. Grandma and grandpa have them, my parents have them along with all my aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings and now my husband has one too. This was the first year that we actually had a fireplace to hang them on. I think they are one of my favourite decorations because they're not just a decoration, they're a bit of my family that I will always have, even when I don't get to spend time with them over the holidays.
We have a handful of other Christmas traditions, but as we do them every year, I think I'll save those for another Christmas post in the years to come.