Christmas - Hermit Style

Matt and I ended up completely alone for Christmas Eve and Day this year.  We made the best of it by whipping up a full blown holiday dinner (with a week's worth of leftovers) and indulging in an embarrassing display of laziness. 

Here's a peek at our tree and general deco-goodness

I'm cheating a bit with this photo, since it is from last year. I didn't get a chance to get a new one, but our lights are the same!

We bought this angel 5 years ago, and it has never worked until this year. What does it MEAN?!

Christmas Eve, we spent most of the day cooking. Every year, we make a chili cheese dip which is ridiculously easy to throw together.

This is what you'll need.

Chop up the Velveeta into cubes.

Toss it into a crock pot, and set it to a low temperature.

Once the cheese has softened, toss in the Rotel.

And the chili.

Not gonna lie, it's gonna look suspiciously like dog food at this point, but pop on the lid and leave it alone for a couple of hours.

.. this is what you'll end up with. Yum yum!

In the meantime, the bird went into the roaster.

The night before, we baked biscuits and homemade cornbread in preparation for my family's Super Top Secret Dressing recipe.

All of that gets crumbled into a big container.

You'll need some of these.

Minced and sauteed with some sage sausage.

Then you mix that in with the biscuit/cornbread crumbles, along with other Super Secret ingredients. Oh, and it must be mixed by hand.. because it's good for the soul.

One recipe makes two 9x13 pans of dressing, so one goes into the freezer for Valentine's Day.

We had some time to kill while the turkey cooked, so we took the Dex Man outside for some fetch. He lives for fetch. Seriously. We have to spell B-A-L-L in our house, because if you say the word he'll go into a frenzy searching for it.

The photo on the left is him humoring me with a half-second glance at the camera, even though he'd much rather keep his eye trained on the B-A-L-L that daddy is holding (photo on the right).

Once he was tuckered out and had collapsed into the grass, Matt played a game while I read Stephen King's new book.

An hour later, and it's back to work! We mashed up some fresh boiled sweet potatoes..

Added a dash of butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and some milk. There's really no way to screw up sweet potatoes. Some like them super sweet, and some like them not-so-sweet (our preference) Add as much or as little as you like.

Spread 'em into a pan and top with either marshmallows or a pecan glaze.

While the dressing and potatoes cooked, Matt carved the bird.

Finished potatoes.

Dinner time!

Champagne in the toasting flutes from our wedding. D'aw, aren't we sentimental and stuff?

*chuckle snort*

And for dessert, pumpkin pie!

The upside about cooking a huge holiday dinner for just the two of us? We have so many leftovers we won't have to cook again for a week!!

Since we were bums all day there are no photos of us (thankfully) but here's one of our elderly girl, Peanut. 16.5 years old and still going strong. She's a tough one!

We finished out our Christmas Eve watching A Christmas Story (my all-time favorite holiday movie) before going to bed. Our Christmas Day was spent at home opening stockings. We decided not to exchange real gifts this year since we are putting so much into the new studio, but we had a great couple days of laziness and enjoyed the break from work!!