It’s been a busy holiday season for us!

I’d like to take a moment to wish all of my regular readers and visitors a belated Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I hope that you’ve been having a great time with friends and family.

We had a great Christmas. In fact, I guess getting ready for the holiday and then having house guests are the main reason why I haven’t written a new post for a while. Sorry!

Our Christmas celebrations started on December 20th! My husbands brother drove down or is it up? from Chicago with his two teenage sons. Chris and I were supposed to go to his parents house (in Brantford (an hour and a half away)) for an early family Christmas dinner, but wouldn’t you know it … our furnace started making a high pitched whining sound late Saturday night!

We quickly called our furnace repair call center services line to see if someone could come right away to fix our furnace. I mean, it was so loud we, at first, had thought our crazy neighbors had a circular saw running outside in the driveway between our houses! So we’d turned off the furnace as 1. it didn’t sound healthy, and 2. who could live with that god awful sound!

Did you know that furnace repair people won’t come out to your house on an emergency basis unless your furnace has totally stopped working? Yeah … so .. we scheduled an appointment and as it turned out I stayed home to await the furnace repairman while Chris went to his parents house for Christmas dinner. Doesn’t it just figure that my mother in law actually cooked a turkey for the first time in years and I missed it?

It also turned out that the furnace repair guy canceled on us and didn’t come until Monday! Luckily the whining sound the furnace was making was only really loud the first time it occurred and our furnace kept on running until it was repaired. (it was a bearing problem).

Chris returned home last Sunday night with his brother and our nephews (and a little care package for me full of turkey dinner, yum). Our house guests stayed for two days. Once they cleared out we started getting ready for Christmas day. My sister and her boyfriend came over to join us for Christmas.

I’m sure many of you went through the same things I did as you got ready for Christmas. By this I mean the house got a major cleaning and so did the good china and silverware that hadn’t been used for a year or so! LOL Then I had to start getting the food ready.

I decided to brine a turkey this year. It was soooooo good! It had a mildly salty taste but oh it was so very very moist! Brined turkey is the best!

I brined our turkey in an extra large ziploc bag placed inside a cooler. The brine mix consisted of Kosher salt, brown sugar, and Rosemary, Thyme and Sage spices. Unfortunately the bag started leaking in the night – luckily I checked on the turkey at 2:30 am in the morning and struggled to get it into another bag and made more brine to soak it in!

I spent most of Christmas day preparing for the big meal. I cooked candied sweet potatoes and carrots, green peas, mashed potatoes with garlic, stuffing with garlic, onion and walnuts, a pumpkin pie and of course the brined turkey. The meal was delicious and we had a great time with my sister and her boyfriend!

If anyone would like my recipe for brined turkey just let me know. I’ll make a post with the recipe if there’s enough interest.

After a busy week of cooking, cleaning and visiting with family Chris and I have spent the weekend recovering! No boxing day shopping for us! I would have loved to gone out and bought some items at great prices (ie a washing machine maybe) but we just can’t afford it right now. BTW boxing day in Canada is like Black Friday for Americans- it’s the day with the best sales!

Now I’m gearing up for more house guests. My brother from Vancouver and his wife are flying in on Tuesday evening for my nieces wedding on the 30th and they’ll be here until the 31st.

We’re looking forward to our last guests of the holiday season, but also, by the time it’s over I’m sure we’re going to be in need of a few days rest as we’ll have been going for two weeks straight with visitors and holiday prep and goings on.

I hope that you had a great holiday! What are your plans for New Years?