Embarking On Our Own Holiday Traditions

 

In all of my 10 years living in Alaska, this is only the second Christmas I've spent in the state. We usually go back East to spend the holidays with family. This is our first year on our own, as parents and we're taking the opportunity to create our own family traditions! We started by cutting down our own tree (legally) in the Chugach National Forest, the Sunday following Thanksgiving. Today on Christmas Eve, we started the day by making a Spanish tortilla (based off a recipe the Papa Bear's parents found when stationed in Spain in the early 80s), we also made biscuits from scratch and used our brand new star shaped cookie cutter for them. The Little Bear was fantastic at kneading the dough and pushing the cookie cutter down. He also did a fantastic job of wiping down the flour covered counters in the clean up effort that followed.

The night before last we received an amazingly perfect gift for a toddler! My aunt & uncle sent the munchkin an apron, whose pockets were filled with fun kitchen gadgets, a snowflake cookie sheet, a candy form, cookie cutter and a fabulous kid friendly cookbook. If you happen to have a toddler in your life you just might surprise them with this perfect age appropriate gift that can be modified for any season!

Cooking is such a great learning opportunity to involve your children in concepts such as volume, measurement, fractions, states of matter, physics and chemistry can be experienced in context. Not to mention they also get to take in sensory information, use descriptive language and just have good old fashioned family fun!

 

Tonight we'll be feasting on steak and Alaskan King Crab... I'll be having the crab and Bop will be having the steak. New England tradition is seafood on Christmas Eve (at least in my family). I'm the only one in this house (so far) that likes it. So I'll be eating local seafood and endulging. Tomorrow we'll be trying our hand at roasting a Christmas Goose, which turns out to be a Finnish tradition, making it that much more special. Will post how that turns out...