Something Like Christmas

downtown daegu’s streets decorated with lights, trees, and plenty of photo ops

Spam is a popular host/ess gift, especially during the holidays and new year. It can usually be found in department stores wrapped in a very nice gift box.

Oranges are also popular this time of year. We have literally been buying them by the box full and eating them for dessert every night.

Vanillekipferl

kitties don’t seem to mind tiny trees

cheers!

Our tree is finally up! It is totally a Charlie Brown’s Christmas sort of tree but that’s ok. Even having that little bit of colored light in the smallest corner of our living room has made things a tad more festive. It took me maybe 15 minutes tops to ‘decorate’ the tree and hang up our wreath. I played a few holiday tunes and drank some hot matcha tea (currently addicted) it started to feel like maybe it was the holidays after all.

So far the only holiday movie I’ve watched thus far has been The Family Stone. When I worked as a designer for a retail company, my old boss was absolutely obsessed with this movie. She wanted us all to watch it and then she totally ripped it off used it as inspiration for our “nontraditional” holiday catalog cover. I never did get around to watching the movie until now. Guess what? It wasn’t worth the wait. Instead of Christmas movies we binge watched Making a Murderer on Netflix. Has anyone else watched this? We loved the Serial podcast last year and we were totally sucked into this as well. Definitely not very Christmas-y in the uplifting joyful sense, but such a captivating story.

I have been in something of a baking mood. Every year I like to try to make a German cookie or cake recipe because it reminds me of my Grandma who made lebkuchen and springerle this time of year. So far I have made ginger snaps and some very ‘rustic’ looking vanilla crescent cookies. Tomorrow I plan on making spitzbuben. Fingers crossed.

Once we decided to stick around and enjoy the holidays at our house instead of traveling off somewhere we made a late afternoon trip to Costco which was absolutely packed at 3pm on a Monday. We picked up some wine, booze, and a box of oranges and then went in search of a roast of some sort. We didn’t find a whole roast there but luckily Sly found one elsewhere today. He has already started marinating the roast. I can’t wait.