Christmas 2012

Hi all,

Christmas 2012 started with making the cephalopod based ginger bread cookies I am famous ( or infamous ) for.  My kids helped me do this over Thanksgiving.  We start with a standard ginger bread dough, roll it out about 1/8" think and then cut out the cephalopod patterns.  I just drew a Christmas based squid, octopus and cuttlefish out on heavy cardboard and cut them out with scissors.  Then you lay the pattern on the rolled out ginger bread dough and trace its outline with a knife, peel it out of the dough and place on a cookie sheet.  I used parchment paper under the dough to keep things from sticking.  Here is a Christmas octopus ready to be cut out.  The pattern has the colors for the hat and so forth we want to add when we do the icing.

After it is cut out it looks like this.

Here is the Christmas squid laid out on the cookie dough before cutting it out.

Once cut out, here you can see the squid next to its pattern.  You can see how we will try to color it with icing too.

Once enough have been cut out, we have a cookie sheet full ready to bake.

And after baking, we have our undecorated cookies.

The kids made a few other christmas cookies -- like a whale!

After decorating, the cookies went into plastic bags so they would still be fresh throughout the holidays.

Then we decorated the house for the holidays.  We always do that at Thanksgiving.
Here is my home study with lights.  The light strings have a lot of space oriented ornaments like shuttles and star trek themed pieces.  Some of them say things when you turn on the lights, so in the morning when I turn on the lights in my study, I hear this wonderful crazy blend of "lift off" and other sayings!

Then we put up our tree and decorated it.

Now we were ready for the holidays!