Family Celebrations

It seems we have had lots to celebrate lately!  I have loved every minute of the celebrating, too. 

Tomorrow will be a big day for celebrating for us.  All four children are coming with their families and we are going to eat together, share time together, and share the Christmas gifts we have for one another.  I am almost as excited as a child on Christmas Eve! 

I've spent the evening baking sweets for my sweeties.  Since I have been sickly this year, I decided to cheat and bought the break-and-bake kind of cookies in the refrigerator section of the grocery store.  So, I have three different kinds of cookies to whet folks' sweet tooth.  I stumbled across a recipe for Pecan Pie Brownies and adapted it a little bit to make it simpler for me. 

The recipe for that can be found HERE.  I also found a recipe for Sea Turtles in the 2011 edition of Christmas with Southern Living and I have shared that recipe HERE. 

I used the leftover chocolate frosting from the Sea Turtles and covered some pretzel sticks. 

In the foreground is a platter of Sea Turtles with white chocolate frosting. 

The pretzels are right behind with the Pecan Pie Brownies on the rack in the back. 

You also can get a glimpse of the dark chocolate Sea Turtles at the right.

Surely that and the candies in everybody's stockings will keep us sweetened up!

Mike is planning to grill a couple of port tenderloins in the morning.  I'll bake the spiral sliced ham and cook the slices of country ham.  We will probably pull out a bit of the leftover turkey meat from where Mike cooked Big Tom.  We will bake a few of the biscuits I have in the freezer and I have a couple of loaves of Artisan bread from the grocery deli and we can have sandwiches.  Then, we will mix up a couple of kinds of dips for chips.  I'll prepare a cream cheese/pepper jelly spread and we will be set.  We figure that this sort of munchy fare and some cocktail wieners, pigs-in-a-blanket, and Chex Mix will take us through the evening as we ring in the new year.

The great thing about this celebration is that our whole family will be here with us as we celebrate our wedding anniversary!  How wonderful is that?  Aren't we lucky that the whole world celebrates on our anniversary?