Well, I just got back home after spending a long weekend with my mother and sister over Christmas. I do believe we've finally figured out the right way to go about it, too - a long weekend of large quantities of good homemade food and enjoying each other's company.

Christmas Even was pleasantly hectic. We spent about half the day doing pre-spring cleaning, after which I spent about 5 hours putting together a minestrone soup from a recipe I'd wanted to try out. Timing, I have read, is everything in soupmaking. Luckily, this is apparently not necessarily true. I only skimmed over the instructions at first, so I ended up discovering on several occasions that something was due to be put into the pot that I hadn't even prepared yet ("What, there were potatoes in this, too?"). The long cooking time does have the advantage of providing both a long break and a chance to build dramatic tension ("OK, update! We've only got an hour and forty five minutes to go on the soup!"). In any case, despite the various timing snafus, it was loved by all. I'm definitely adding that one to my playlist.

After filling up on my sister's homemade pizza and my minestrone over episodes of West Wing, it was about midnight, just the right time to start putting together a pie. My sister gleefully opted out, leaving my mom and me to put it together ourselves. This was actually nice from my point of view - for one thing, I love spending time with my mom. For another, I really want to learn how to make this pie. My mom, you see, has The Best Apple Pie Recipe on Earth. I've basically been sworn to secrecy on its content, but suffice it to say that I have had apple pie on two different continents, and none remotely compares. So I really wanted to learn how to make it myself, since I now have an oven of my own.

However, the zen-like effect a good kitchen has on me is negated by not knowing very well what I'm doing, and by having to take instruction. And by having to slice apples. We have two principal methods of slicing apples in my mother's house, and both give my blood pressure a good spike. The first method, preferred by everyone in the house but me, is a hand-crank operated apple slicer supplied by the Pampered Chef (apparently the idea is that chefs need a little frustration in their lives so as not to get too pampered). I can never get the core as precisely aligned as it need to be in order for the device to work. The other is doing it by hand, and I can never seem to get the all-important thickness consistently right.

I think that the version of the recipe I pass down to the next generation will phrase this step "4. Delegate the cutting of the apples into thin slices."

After much effort and pith, and about 2 more hours, the pie was in the oven, and it turned out to be the best in recent history.

In light of my financial situation, I had no idea what I was going to do for gifts this year. Luckily, the night before Christmas Eve, my mother wanted to stop at Joseph Beth (our local eqivalent of Barnes & Noble) to look for a few books. While there, I picked up the new Jennifer Weiner novel in hardback for my sister and a new scrapbook/photo album for my mom to record all the memories created in her new home. Both were very well received.

I did pretty well, myself. Amongst other things, I received a countertop dishwasher (a device I have wished for many times over the past year), a rolling pin, pie plate, and other apple pie equipment, and a trip to Jo-Ann fabrics to pick out a pattern and fabric for a project to work with my mom on. In a nice bit of synchronicity, my sister also thought of the idea of buying me a photo album.

I'm not sure when exactly it got started, but we in my family have had a very nice little tradition for the past several years. We have a small, hollow, vaguely Victorian sterling silver heart ornament that can hold small objects. Each year, one of the three of us gives another a gift in the heart (which I have come to think of as the 'afikomen' because it is usually somewhat hidden on the tree). As it turns out, I was handed the heart this year to fill next year for my sister.

We have a very small, very close family. I like to say that it's been streamlined. It consists of my mother, my sister, myself, and our various animals. We started with a rather large, extended family, but gradually it's been refined down to this core, in part because much of the remaining family is batshit. The three of us have been through a whole lot together, and we now have one of the nicest family dynamics I've ever come across: that of three very cool women (if I do say so myself) sharing our respective gifts with each other.

Now all I need to do is modify my kitchen faucet so that I can actually use that dishwasher....

(holiday photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleur_d_elise [1] )

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