12 More days....

We are in full fledged Christmas mode!

It started last weekend with the cookies. Oh, the cookies! My friend Sherry from work came over last Saturday to help me decorate the snowflake sugar cookies. Last year I only made 40 and they didn't last long, so this year I decided to step it up to a hundred. The turned out way prettier than last year and we got them done in way less time! So I think I'm getting more efficient with this which is a very good thing.

After that, I was feeling like I was on a roll so I made 118 peanut butter balls and 40 marzipan covered cherries. Whew! All of the baking I had planned for the weekend done in one day!

But the next day, I couldn't stop! I made a double batch of lebekuchen (my favorite!) and a double batch of hazelnut apricot thumbprints. Then I had to stop because nothing else on my list was freezable so it was too soon to start on it.

The next challenge was getting it all into my tiny freezer. The short version is that we took a whole chicken out to thaw and John and I had to finish a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream that was there. But I got them all in!

On Monday morning I finished up some Christmas shopping. Tuesday, we put the tree up and on Wednesday we decorated. It looks gorgeous as usual! I love my tacky artificial tree covered in pink and white sparkly decorations (and one lone scuba diver ornament). Thursday was more Christmas shopping and on Friday I did most of the wrapping.

So I'm almost ready! One more present to buy, cakes to make next weekend and that's it! I'm excited to come home!

Work has been challenging. I feel like the two months of training didn't really prepare me for the actual work, but my team has been very supportive in making this a smooth transition for me. I've been doing lots of job shadowing and supervised work, so I'm learning a little more each day. It's been pretty exhausting mentally though, to have to learn so much so quickly. I've been feeling pretty drained at the end of the day and I suspect that's part of why I've been baking so much. I'm looking forward to the day when I can go to work, do my job confidently and effectively and then go home.

One of the girls at work organized a cookie exchange for later this week, which is something I've always wanted to do! The concept is that everyone brings 36 cookies, and you give 4 cookies and the recipe to each person so everyone goes home with 36 new cookies in 9 different flavours. Fun! I'm bringing peanut butter balls.

Other than that, we've been taking it pretty easy around here. We got our first snowfall this week. It stayed for two days and then the rain melted it. I've been totally hooked on One Tree Hill. Does anyone else watch this? Yup, life is pretty exciting here in the big city.