I don’t know that I have ever in my life cooked as much as I did yesterday. In my family, we do our big meal on Christmas Eve, and we do leftovers on Christmas Day. But man alive, it was a meal.

I made:
* Baked brie (appetizer)
* Dressing
* Creamed spinach
* Mashed potatoes
* English (green) peas
* Yorkshire pudding (my mother-in-law’s recipe)
* Ooey gooey cake (my friend Kris’s recipe; let me know if y’all want me to post it because everyone in my family made little happy noises when they ate it)

It doesn’t seem like that much when I list it like that, but when you’re trying to cook it all at the same time? Yeah, that’s a lot.

Here’s what we ate that I didn’t make:
* Sweet potatoes (my mom made those)
* Ham and turkey (those both came from Honey Baked Ham)

Christmas dinner was pretty awesome, even if I am tooting my own horn by saying so. And my brother is great about washing dishes as soon as I finish with them, so I didn’t have a huge pile of mess by the time the food was ready. That was really, really nice.

We did most of our gift exchange last night. Or rather, the adults exchanged gifts last night, and Catie got to open her “boring” stuff (read: clothes), plus a few little things. The Santa Claus stuff was this morning, and it was quite a hit.

Later, since the weather was nice, we went to the park near our house and walked for a while. Well, the idea was to walk, but we played more than walked. There’s a big lake there with lots of ducks and geese – and seagulls, which sort of spooked Catie a little since they sort of swarmed all around us as soon as we started to throw bread to the ducks.

The rest of our Christmas pics are here. I’ll be adding more as we take them. Merry Christmas, everybody!