We made Christmas cookies today at Christina's house. It was my idea and I made the dough and the icing, but my little Samuel really wasn't ready for this kind of fun. Thank goodness Jackson, Jacob, Julia, and Shelby were there to make and decorate that double batch of cookies I thought we needed! They had a good time and so did I. I was a very inexperienced cookie maker/decorator, so I didn't realize that the sugar crystals are supposed to go on the cookies before you bake them. Julia informed me of that when they came out and I asked, "Now how do we get the sugar crystals to stick to the cookies?" I thought maybe we should brush melted butter over them and then sprinkle them. I also made powdered sugar icing. I had heard somewhere that you can put it in a ziplock baggy and snip the end and voila! you have an easy decorator. Well it didn't quite come out voila! My sister snipped too much so it came out in gobs. Then we decided we would just smooth the icing over the entire cookie with a knife. Julia thought the cookies were ugly until she got very efficient and creative with that baggie and made some very cute ones. She and Shelby were very good at making those cookies, and I relied on them to finish that double batch for me. They were very tasty so who cared what they looked like? I know Santa will enjoy them.
Joey is determined to have a son who hunts and fishes. He lets Samuel handle his catch every time he comes home. Joey went duck hunting on Wednesday and then finished the trip off by doing some trout fishing. He and his friend killed 11 ducks and caught 10 trout. Dinner is served! He killed a hooded marganza, which is a very pretty duck. I heard him tell his friend, very surreptitiously, to take all the ducks except that one and leave us all the fish. I knew what he had in mind for that hooded marganza and I yelled from the porch that if he put one more stuffed animal in my house a new entry would be written in my divorce journal. We already have a deer, a fish, 4 ducks, and a goose. That's enough, don't you think?!
These are wonderful pictures, Angela. The cookies turned out so tasty and they even looked good (mostly). It sounded like a really fun morning. The duck-and-fish pictures were good too. Samuel is too young to be squeamish right now, but give him another year or two and I'll bet he won't be picking up a big fish like that. Or a darling little duck with its precious little head bent backward.