Happy Epiphany!

Forgot to post this earlier. See the fluffy nest of good deeds for baby Jesus? Once again, the girls loved adding straws to the manger for being good and helpful. My question this year was: does it still count if they're fighting over who gets to do the good deed to add a straw?


yay! The Three Kings came on Sunday!

I'll bet you didn't know that an orange left by the Three Kings tastes much yummier than the kind Mommy gets from the store (even though they're from the same bag)....

We're old-fashioned so, unlike most of the rest of the world it seems, we celebrate the actual Christmas liturgical season, not the Christmas shopping season. We decorated our tree on Christmas Eve, and... well, it's still up. (Until the bitter end this Saturday!) So basically we're not sick of Christmas by the time Epiphany rolls around. We still turn our lights on and listen to Christmas music. And we're still ready to celebrate! Mr. Pickles was feeling under the weather (aka sick as a dog) so we had to cancel one party we had planned to attend, but on Sunday we were able to host a little one for a couple families we know. I tried my hand at making a King Cake. It wasn't squashy like I remembered from friends at college who got King Cakes fed-exed to them from Louisiana -- it was more like a rich, sweet bread -- like Pulla but with cinnamon instead of cardamom. I drizzled it with lemon icing and of course decorated it like a crown. I didn't have a tiny plastic baby on hand, so I used a quarter to hide in the cake (thinking that would be the coin least likely to be swallowed). We ate 9/10 of it at the party, so I guess it was good!

King Cake in all its glory. Mmmmmmmmm.

Enjoy these last days of Christmas! Lent is right around the corner....