T Stands for Ranch Dressing

Hi everyone.

Happy first day of winter (or if you're down south of the equator happy first day of summer) to you.  I'm never excited about the length of winter here in New Hampshire, but after today, at least the days start to slowly get longer. 

Can you believe that Christmas is just a few days away? 

I need to do some meal planning this week for the holiday, wrap a few last gifts due to a change in the holiday situation (more about that in a minute), and I have a bit of holiday baking I want to finish. Writing it here it doesn't sound like much, but I feel like I have a busy schedule this week.

I'm hoping I can finish knitting this hufflepuff Harry Potter hat for my daughter by Christmas, but I'm not certain that will happen.

I've been knitting every night for the last few weeks, but this hat is made on really small needles (US size 2, UK size 12 and European size 2.75 mm) so several rows of knitting only amounts to a small amount of hat increase.  The checkerboard part is easy because it is a pattern, but the hufflepuff insignia is not a pattern and takes more concentration as every row is different. Plus, it has to be perfect in order for the insignia to look like it is supposed to look.  I'm having fun knitting it though, and I'm really happy how its coming along. 

And if I don't finish it, then she'll just get it after Christmas.

During our Saturday snow event I did bake a few more cookies:

sugar cookies for my husband and

gingerbread cookies for my daughter and myself.

I also tried these chocolate crinkles just because I've seen photos of them, and they look so yummy. (They taste it too.)

I wish cookies didn't have any calories or sugar so I just keep baking and eating them. Smile.

For T this week, I have this photo and a little story behind it.

For Christmas our daughter was supposed to be coming home. Well she still is, but her fiance is most likely coming also. I feel bad for him because he planned to be with his immediate family for Christmas, but at the end of last week his sister was diagnosed with covid. He wants to postpone his family Christmas get together until after his sister is past her quarantine period, which makes sense, but his Mom sounds like she doesn't want to do that. 

Luckily last I heard his sister isn't very sick, but his mom is not vaccinated ( as his sister wasn't either), and his mom doesn't seem to understand that just because his sister is only mildly ill, she could catch covid and get very ill. Of course there's no way of knowing that, but the situation is causing all kinds of issues for his family. My daughter's fiance's dad is vaccinated, and he wants to postpone their Christmas celebration also. 

I don't know what will happen yet, but right now we have to plan that her fiance will be joining us. That is not a problem at all for us. The only thing we want to do is to be sure he feels included. That means we want him to have a Christmas stocking on Christmas morning as we still do stockings with little gifts for each other (like candy, chapstick/lip balm and and maybe a new toothbrush), and we want him to have a couple more gifts under the tree to open as we open ours.  

This put us into last minute shopping mode. We already had him a big gift, but we needed small things. We know him pretty well, but not well enough to know, for example, what kind of socks he likes or what little Lego set (he and my daughter are huge Lego fans) he might like.

My daughter is taking care of some of the shopping, but one thing she told us he loves is Chick-Fil-A ranch dressing, which he's had trouble finding. One place she knew we could buy it was at the Chick-Fil-A food truck. As we don't have any Chick-Fil-A's fast food restaurants around us, there is a food truck that comes to various shopping areas and has a limited menu.

Anyhow, to shorten this novel, this past Saturday the food truck was in Kittery, Maine. Since the hubby and I didn't have a lot we needed to do, we decided to drive down and get the fiance some sauce for Christmas.

Kittery isn't too far away, and as you can see, we were successful getting him his sauce. 

We also grabbed sandwiches for lunch, which we can see in my photo still in its wrapper with the Diet Coke I brought from home.  That's my photo for T this week.

Don't forget to stop by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for this week's T.

Now I just need to wrap his few gifts, but I'm waiting a few days so that if he doesn't come with my daughter on the 24th, we can  put aside his small gifts until his birthday or do something else with them.  Except the Ranch dressing, which we will give him anyhow.

Thanks to all of you who sent me a Christmas card too. I still need to photograph and post those, but I was out all day today and didn't get a chance to do that.

 For those of you I only "see" on Tuesdays, I wish you a wonderful Christmas and week ahead. And of course that goes for everyone who stops by also.

Happy Holidays!