Christmas in Scotia, NY

I meant to update my blog during the holidays – silly me, I thought I would have spare time during my two weeks of vacation! However, I was fully occupied with enjoying the time I could spend with my family and of course with my fiancé and his mom. It was the first Christmas that Matt and I had ever celebrated together, and also the first time that my family had met anyone from his family. Matt waited for me to come back from Paris to go shopping for decorations, only to find out that the stock of decorations in the stores had dwindled, few trees were left for sale, and that even finding lights for the tree was difficult! Of course, it was worth the trouble and a nice memory, since the tree was, in the end, beautiful.

My lovely stand mixer and I spent some quality time together over cookie dough, even though my Christmas Eve search for the ice cream maker attachment was unsuccessful. Here are some of the cookies my family decorated: frosted sour cream cookies (made with lard!), unfrosted sugar cookies, and my favorite peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses. Cookie consumption was at very high levels this week.


Although there were terrible snowstorms out west, the weather in Scotia was mild and rainy. Since I have spent the last 10 Christmas holidays in Florida and because of course Paris has little hope of seeing snow this winter, I was disappointed to miss what I considered to be my only chance to play in the snow. A few days after Christmas, we did get a little, which was beautiful while it lasted (about 36 hours). Sunday morning, I took a little walk around Scotia, and ended up following some squirrel tracks down to the Mohawk river.