Goodness Christmas Eve at my house was entertaining this year! Somehow, my Mom, little sister and I decided to feed my Dad and his fellow officers at work and then stay up all night to wait for him to get home. That was an adventure.
We started cooking at about noon to deliver food at 8pm. Mom made BBQ, baked beans, corn on the cob and had planned for several desserts. We were going to KFC to get coleslaw and mashed potatoes before we went to deliver the meal.
Well, I took some sinus medication at about 12:30 and it made me very lethargic (that kind of medication has never done that before). I was unable to help cook the meal. The only thing I did was make pudding for "mud." The rest of what I will share about the meal comes from listening to my family talk about it. All of the food went together pretty well, except the pork shrank a lot before Mom could pull it. But the desserts were a disaster. Autumn made red-velvet cake and it fell apart when she tried to get it out of the pan (my family hasn't been able to make a red-velvet cake without it falling apart in years). Mom made cookies, but they were a bit too crispy (Mom never burns cookies). The pudding I made never thickened, so we had a large bowl of chocolate milk instead of pudding for mud. Mom also made magic-bars, but they never became solid in the pan. So instead of magic bars, we had coconut, graham crackers, chocolate chips and walnuts like a lasagna in a pan. If you tried to pull one out, it became like cereal instead.
Needless to say, we ended up leaving the house early to go to Walmart for desserts. I didn't go inside because I was still pretty knocked out from the medicine. Autumn said that the entire produce section was picked clean and they didn't have much for desserts. They got cupcakes and about four packages of cookies. It wasn't as good as what we had planned, but we were thankful they had something left. We placed the desserts on trays and saran wrapped them in the Walmart parking lot before heading to deliver the food. We had already been to KFC and got a large family meal (because the pork had shrank and Mom wanted to make sure there was enough food), coleslaw and mashed potatoes and gravy. I was finally waking up from my medication, and I was a lot better after we delivered the meal. All of the officers were very grateful for the food and we felt blessed to be able to do that for them.
It was 8:15 when we left there, and we headed to see my extended family for a while. Since we were going to be up all night anyway, it wasn't that big of a deal to go. It's at least an hour's worth of driving time but it was fun. Christmas day also happens to be my cousin's birthday, so I wanted to go see him and tell him happy birthday. We left Marion at about 10pm and went to get dinner for ourselves when we remembered that we hadn't eaten all day. We had no intentions of cooking dinner, so we went to wherever was open (I think it ended up being Cookout).
After getting home we wrapped the presents we had left to wrap, watched Christmas movies (and The Princess and the Frog) and played Rack-O until about 3am, at which point Mom suggested we take a nap. We would have to be up at 6am to make breakfast for Dad anyway. As per tradition, we all grabbed blankets and slept in the living room as a family. It was really hot all night so we didn't sleep much, but it was good. My alarm went off at 6am and we decided that no one was hungry enough for breakfast, so instead we turned on A Christmas Story and waited for Dad to get home. He said that his officers had loaded what was left of the food into the car, so he didn't have to. We enjoyed some family time for a while, and then we had Christmas!
Christmas Eve from this year will be memorable forever. I enjoyed the chaos, honestly. It was chaotically peaceful. Just the way I like it!
Adventure on, my friends!
Taylor Ryerse
The Adventure Junkie
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