I like to think Christmas is a time of connecting with family, remembering why the holiday exists in the first place, purchasing and wrapping gifts, and some quiet moments of rest…but let’s have a moment of honesty.  It’s a good excuse to eat everything you know you shouldn’t.

Cookies, candies, chocolate covered anything and everything, cakes, nuts, caramel corn, and pies are lurking all over the place.

A woman who is trying to eat ‘Primally‘ has no hope of success over Christmas unless she has a will of iron.  I forgot to ask Santa for that this Christmas.

Every Christmas my family vows to eat healthy and go for a run together every morning.

I last for one to two days at the most.

Then the sleeping in and sloth-like habits take over from sugar-induced comas.

At this point, we all WANT to be good, but can’t…

DL – Hey guys.  Ummm….are we going for a run today?
Thinner Family Member – Well, we are supposed to…perhaps later?
DL – Yeah.  Sure.  LATER it is.

Then when later comes, I am conveniently busy with a piece of cheesecake and just can’t go for a run.  Shoot!

Every year I get the SAME THING for Christmas – tight pants.

My question is – who ISN’T vowing to go on a diet tomorrow?

PS – I just ate my last *wink* peanut butter and chocolate cookie…

Until last night, I thought that men never did such things.

When a man records a sporting event on TV to watch later, the last thing he wants to know is the score. Jon is an avid Roughrider fan, and I am more of benchwarmer. We were gone all day yesterday so he PVR’ed the game to watch that evening.

I was online catching up on emails and whatnot and asked him to look at something. Then I quickly yelled, “NO! Don’t look! And don’t look on the internet either, you might find out the score!”

In a matter of 2 seconds, he looked extremely disappointed and asked if I knew what the score was. And then he said, “Do you know who wins? Please just lie to me. I don’t want to know.”

This made me burst out into gales of laughter. I didn’t see anything about the game, I was just trying to be a supportive wife!

I suppose the main difference between men and women is that men freely admit their need to be lied to and women rarely do.

Pickles may possibly be one of the weirder canned foods out there.  As far as I know, cucumbers are the only food that gets a new name once they are canned.  When a person cans peaches they are still referred to as peaches, they are simply in a canned state.

There are Gherkins, Polish, Bread and Butter, Dill, Lime, Kosher, and even Koolickles. Someone was doing something a bit crazy the day they decided to add Kool Aid to the pickles…

Now, my mom is a very good mom.  She always made sure to bake cookies with us, take us to the library, laughed at our antics as only a mom can do, ensure we cleaned up after ourselves, and canned foods and made jam every Summer when we were growing up.  I am proud to say, she even attempted the creation of a kosher dill pickle one year. 

When I was about 7 years old, we all piled into the car and went down to the local vegetable farm.  While my brother ran around in joyous abandon, my sister and I helped my mom find the smallest cucumbers available.  She also purchased a bouquet of dill, about 12 gallons of vinegar, and most likely a bushel of garlic.

We then proceeded to wash and shove the small cucumbers into all the canning jars available in the house.  My job was to put a petite dill spray into each jar.  My poor sister was tasked with putting the garlic chunks in the jars.  My sister kept our block vampire free for the next 4 years. 

Once all the jars were full of the required ingredients, Mom began the arduous task of changing a cucumber into a pickle.  She started the huge black canner that looked like a witch’s cauldron and put all the cans into the hot brew.  A stench like no other started to emanate from the kitchen.  A smell that burned deep into our nostrils and constricted air flow to the brain filled the house.  All 3 of us quickly abandoned mom to play in the backyard until the change of the cucumber to the pickle was complete.  Hours later, she emerged unscathed and announced that pickles were done.

After the creation of the pickle was complete, the house smelled for about a month.  We thoroughly enjoyed the homemade kosher crunch, but never forced ourselves to endure the torture of forcing small cucumbers to become pickles again.  We were more than happy to can things that did not change names once canned, such as apples, peaches, and pears.