I was just telling a few friends the other day that the 12 Days of Christmas seem more like the 12 Days of Christmas Clean up.  I’ve been trying to plow the detritus of Christmas to the appropriate location, ie kids rooms, trash can, dish washer, washing machine, etc.  So far I haven’t gotten to grade papers yet… the Christmas lazy’s are still here.  It’s just hard to be motivated to get work done with dh home.

The children love their gifts and it was one of our more successful Christmas’s on that front.  To be home alone, no family or guests, was much more relaxing than last year.  The kinks in meal plans (ie frozen turkey instead of thawed) didn’t even phase us much.

As lovely as the holidays are, I’m looking forward to getting back into the regular routine… and have already started promising myself things about next year…

Five packages of Italian Sausage… enough for Christmas breakfast, Christmas dinner, and several meals later as 3/5 of it is still frozen! Such a simple thing… and yet, it has brought Christmas to my heart.

Today I began to plan out the Christmas menu.  It’s pretty standard year to year, I really should just do it on the computer and save it as the variations are fairly minor.  As I made up the menu, it occurred to me that once again this year, we’d be celebrating without Italian sausage on the menu.  It may sound silly but it made me a bit melancholy. 

Back when I married my husband and we celebrated our first Christmas with his family, the foods were so alien.  The turkey I recognized, and the salad, but that was it.  The dressing wasn’t cornbread… in fact, it had meat and potatoes and stuff in it.  What WAS that anyway? Then there were the fig cookies… Not fig newtons, but a traditional Italian cookie, homemade for the holidays.  I don’t like fig newtons. Then came the Italian sausage… both a treat for breakfast or the main meal.  Italian sausage is a very heavy sausage and quite the different flavor from your typical American fare of bland kielbasa. Most of my mother-in-laws cooking was an instant favorite however, and before a couple of years passed I had learned how to fix them all, including all the traditional holiday fare that had been so foreign to me at first.

Recently my husband and I celebrated 15 years of marriage, and are closing on our second year in Illinois. At this point, Fig cookies, heavy stuffing and Italian sausage are favorites of mine too.  Illinois doesn’t have Italian sausage.  The dried figs I can get. The turkey, and trimmings, can all be pulled together from the local grocers.  The Italian sausage I can’t get, unless maybe there is some spot in Chicago that has it, not that I know of one.

This evening hubby was on the phone with his mom.  She was wondering if we had received the girls Christmas gifts (we had) and when he hung up, he told me she had sent us some Italian sausage, packed to ship in dry ice. I thought I was gonna cry. It was the best gift she could’ve given us.  Just a few links of sausage, but it felt like I’d been given a huge piece of home via UPS.  I can’t adequately describe the lift in spirits, the interior warmth that came from knowing she had gone to the trouble to do that for us. 

So in the next couple of days, I will be haunting my front door amid my Christmas baking and last minute prep… because a bit of Christmas is coming packed in dry ice via UPS… and the Christmas Menu is complete after all.