Christmas at our house

We started out by cooking all day Monday, Christmas Eve. My mom made our favorite strawberry punch and we got out the Christmas tablecloth and serving platters.
I made this fudge from scratch late Sunday night. It's better if it has time to really set. The recipe is Alton Brown's from the Food Network. The recipe itself is easy, it just takes forever to cook up to the right temperature and cool down to the right temperature.
On Monday, while my mom was working on different things for Christmas dinner, I made these cookies and got my apple pie started. The cookies are a Martha Stewart recipe, oatmeal-toffee-chocolate chip-dried cherry. They turned out really good. I froze some of the extra dough to make some more for this weekend. The pie was difficult. The crust turned out crumbly, but the filling pretty good. I think I may try a pie crust recipe with shortening as well as butter next time to see if that makes any difference.

Christmas Day, we woke up pretty early and went downstairs to open presents. I got a lot of new clothes, The Complete Jane Austen, a beautiful version of Pilgrim's Progress, a really nice blue-purple leather pocket book, a coat, and a drafting table to do my artwork on. One really funny moment was when I opened my sister's present to me. Of all the books in all the stores in this town, she had bought me the exact same book I bought her, The Complete Sherlock Holmes. We bought my mom a set of Christmas dishes. They are a set of white dishes with a silver band, but have saucers with silver holly to go with them. We got my dad a DVD set of one of his favorite old TV shows.

I spent the afternoon putting my desk together. When I opened the box, I discovered it was in about a million pieces, but I worked on it for about two hours and managed to put it together. We ate a great dinner of prime rib, stuffed potatoes, and salad and then went to help my sister put her new writing desk together. It was a really nice day. Now I have to print off lots of new reference photos so I can work at my new desk!!!