I am blogging about Christmas each day this entire month. And already feel like there are two or three things each day that deserve attention.
This day was the first official friends get together to exchange presents for Christmas 2011. Friend Carol had friend Pat and I over for dinner at her house in Pleasant Ridge. Carol made a wonderful lentil soup over rice, with salad. Pat brought 3 desserts (Servati’s chess pie and brownies, and Graeter’s ice cream. She just couldn’t choose. I brought the last loaf of Christmas bread I made last year – it had been waiting in the freezer for just such an occasion. (And was actually still great!) Along with numerous kinds of tea, all was perfect!
Great photographer Pat had framed one of her pictures for Carol and one for me – mine is a muted symphony of browns and greens – Kentucky fields in the mist. Carol’s was a colorful shot of two Guatemalan women at a market place there. And then we each got to pick out one more photo to keep (I couldn’t choose between my last two finalists – so my double Gemini self ended up with both: a tree in full fall orange like a star burst, and a barn in a field that had naturally developed a green roof – actually, mostly orange plants on a dark barn in a setting of many greens.
Carol had lots of, as she called them, hand-me-down presents. Mine were seeds from her garden for scarlet runner beans, big zinnias, orange and yellow cosmos and ornamental purple beans. Plus a 2 x 2 inch wooden puzzle – 99 pieces! of an oasis in the Sahara. And, most wonderful of all, an old Irish recipe book, purchased in Ireland by her sister. With – WOW! – a recipe for barm brack – Irish Halloween / harvest bread, that I had made fairly unsatisfactorily last year after much google and wiki searching. This recipe looks terrific.
So I am off to bed, to dream of, not sugarplum fairies, but the perfect barm brack!