Christmas Eve, Christmas Food, etc. etc.

As most people's traditions are, many of our Christmas traditions are centered around food.  Christmas Eve and Christmas day are the two biggest.  

For as long as Tom and I have been married, Christmas Eve food has been homemade Chinese food.  We all have our assignments and the entire day is spent prepping, chopping, mixing sauces, borrowing neighbor's cookware/oven to pull off our feast.  We invite several friends and family over and eat our hearts out.  

It's a lovely tradition.

However, (not sure why!) but the girls were not in the mood for Chinese food this Christmas Eve....  They wanted American food.  Hamburgers, French fries, fry sauce.  We have been working on this menu for a bit so we can share it with Chinese friends, and we have the fries down.  We have to special order the oil, and in our practice, I discovered that ground kosher salt is amazing on fries. But the hamburger is another story....  I have ground up my own meat before, (me and a cleaver) but it's tedious and I just didn't have time.  We have bought a few packages of pretty bad hamburger.  It cooks up like it's 30% meat 70% fat and has largish pieces of gristle in it.  I have also picked through the hamburger to get these pieces out.  Not a joyous job.  Then I found a new source to try for Christmas. Turns out it was not so great either. Oh well. Such is life in China.  But the fries were good!  The toppings were good!  The candlelight was fun!  The company was sweet. And the girls would tell you the Chick-fil-A sauce was bussin'---so it was good!  We have eaten hamburgers in lettuce for quite some time and prefer it to buns--which is a bonus here since I have to make every bread item and that saved me some baking.  All in all, a good food night.

We had to alter our nativity reenactment too.  I was going to have a whole new script based on President Oaks' talk on those who were witnesses of baby Jesus's divinity were "humble, holy and wise".  Each person would take the part of one of those characters as that part of the story was read. But, again, time slipped from me to write up a script. So we just talked about those qualities and witnesses.  Since our theme was on choice, we talked about how those people had been making humble, holy and wise choices again and again and again before their moments in written history and how those strings of choices qualified them to witness and know.  It was a wonderful discussion (few of those happen!) and then we watched the nativity video from the Church.  The girls opened their Hallmark ornament and we sent them to bed.  

Then Tom and I got to work.  We have had a long standing contest each Christmas Eve.  We always try to beat the Hucks's to bed.  They don't know about this. If DeLonne knew she was competing, we would have lost every single year, so we kept it our little secret!  But this year, we knew without any doubt that regardless of what time we got to bed, we would beat the Hucks'.  Being 15 hours ahead has its advantages.  We needed extra time because shape wrapping is a bit of a half-witted idea.  Whoever came up with that plan is up in the night in more ways than one. 🙄  But we did get to bed before the Hucks' got too far into their Christmas Eve day, so another win was great!

Christmas Day food has always been a Honey Baked Ham, and a charcuterie board, unique fruits and leftover Chinese food.  That was impossible.  I can get something that sort of looks like ham here, but I didn't want to touch it....and cheese is almost impossible to find.  However, a few months ago we found a pricey grocery store in a pricey mall that had some cheese.  Blue! And yellow cheddar! Things so common at home suddenly became delicacies!  Tom and I went there two weeks before Christmas for date night and picked up a couple of kinds of cheese.  They had white strawberries and mini watermelons--in mini, I mean smaller than radishes!  But fruit here does not last more than a few days so we decided to go back on the 23rd while we were out and about celebrating Carolyn's birthday.  When we went back however, the entire mall was locked up tight. Covid shutdowns.  Not enough people well enough to work to keep it open.  It was surreal.  So we didn't get that fruit.  

Early on Christmas Eve morning, Tom and I went across the street to grab a few fun sodas for meals.  On the way back we decided to stop at a fruit store.  They had white strawberries!  They were $7 for 9 strawberries, but on Christmas, we are willing to pay a bit.  

Also on Christmas Eve we made our own crackers (not bad!) and bagels (delicious!), so our Christmas day food was white strawberries, toasted bagels, delicious cheddar & blue cheese with homemade crackers, chips and salsa that I had made for the open house, guacamole and all the flavors of Bundaberg soda we could find!  It was merry and bright!

PS.  The white strawberries were okay.  Not much to write home about.  But if you can find them at a reasonable price, you could try them to say you did.  However, if you ever find the mini watermelons, you should pass on them.  The next weekend while in Suzhou, we found some. They taste like a mix of cucumber with watermelon rind but with a tough skin.  Bleck.

After our time in China, we will treasure some foods differently once we're back at home.  But I'm pretty sure that we'll be wanting to get some Asian things in the US that are difficult to impossible to find. Very good things about both places!