Prompts

One nice thing about Holidailies is that it provides a prompt a day for participants to discuss, if they have no other topic to discuss.  The problem is that if you do Holidailies every year, you've pretty much discussed most of those topics ad nauseam....what more can I say about Christmas carols, parties, baking, decorating, family traditions, etc.  

The prompt for today was a new one:

Today is Worldwide Candle Lighting Day. Around the world, people will be lighting candles for 1 hour, starting at 7pm local time, to honor the memories of those we have lost.
Who, or what, did you lose this year?

It's a good prompt and I look forward to reading what others write, but my God, it seems like I have been discussing death in Funny The World for months.  While newcomers here, who come through Holidailies, may not realize how much death has preoccupied my thoughts since October, regular readers here, I am sure, are sick of hearing about it.

In all honesty, since my computer is in the shop and I don't have my WordPerfect files on this laptop, I don't remember who died the first months of this year, but the death of one of our best friends, Mike Blackford, who died while on vacation in Germany, has occupied entirely too much space here, and too many tears.  His memorial service will be held two days after Christmas, which does put a kind of damper on the holiday.  His obituary was in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning.

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This was another Holly Housekeeper day.  First there was The Nap.  I took a 2 hour or so nap this morning, since I'd had nearly no sleep at night (fell asleep sometime after 4 and woke up in time to watch Dick Cheney--and get a bit ill about it--on Meet the Press).  But I woke up with cookies on the brain and so set about making another batch of cookies.  Peanut butter this time.

It's crazy.  I now have 3 batches of cookies in the freezer and other than Ashley and David, who will be here while we are in Santa Barbara, and a batch to Atria, I really don't have any idea what I'm going to do with these cookies.  I will take some to my mother (who won't eat them because she has no taste for food any more, she tells me) and probably take some to Santa Barbara, though I find when I bring a batch of cookies, there are oos and ahhs over how nice they look and then I eat most of them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

But how can I not bake cookies at Christmas time, the only holiday that gives me permission to do so!
I also made a beef stew for dinner.  Weekends are my time to watch cooking shows and all of the cooks become my friends and give me ideas for what to cook.

The stew is from Paula Deen's recipe, altered to fit the ingredients I have.  I may have ODd on Ms. Deen herself and am just as glad she's not dominating the Food Network airwaves any longer, the recipe sounded good.

To go with the stew we will have Pioneer Woman creamed herb potatoes.  I made them yesterday and there is enough left over to feed a small army.

After that is done, maybe I'll have time to make Trisha Yearwood's Snickerdoodles.

But now it's 7 p.m. and it's time to light a candle to represent all of our losses.

I think we're going to need a bigger candle.