Preparing for Christmas

Time: 9:10pm
Mood: Exhausted from a long work week
Song of the moment: Boys Like Girls - Love Drunk

Who would have thought I would have to prepare for Christmas one month prior to the day? I'm finding as you get older, there are more Christmas things you need to do. The only thing I used to worry about was "what gift should I get so-and-so?". Now its thinking of gift ideas, putting up the Christmas tree, making the house look festive, planning Christmas parties, attending Christmas parties, baking cookies... and I'm adding a new one this year - planning Christmas Day dinner. That's just an extra added stress to my already stressful month! This year Jimmy's family is coming over for Christmas dinner. I have a few problems that I have to overcome:

• My dining room table isn't very spacious. That's because my dining room is not very big. So fitting everyone in there plus fitting all the food on my not-so-big table is going to take some creativity.
• What to cook. I have never prepared a Christmas dinner before, and if I was to, I would only know how to make (pardon my lack of racial sensitivity) "white people" Christmas food. You know - like turkey, stuffing, mash potatoes... stuff my mom makes. My inlaws are not big on that kind of food. I'm thinking I might just end up picking up something from a Chinese restaurant and leaving it at that.

Something new that I'm doing this year - instead of making gingerbread cookies I've decided to make small little chocolate dipped shortbread cookies. I made a "dry-run" batch because I haven't made shortbread cookies in a really long time, and I wanted to make sure the receipe I was using actually tastes good. Well thank God I did a dry run - I ended up overbaking the first batch I put into the oven. Smaller cookies = less bake time. Lesson learned!!