Happy Easter!!

Happy Easter Y’all!! I don’t normally post on Sundays, but my family has a fun Easter tradition that I wanted to drop in and share today.

Every Easter Sunday the dessert for our dinner growing up mom made these fun meringue nests for dessert. They are fairly simple to make, the only difficult part is the meringue.  I made the meringues the day before I served them.

The recipe is:

  • 3 egg whites (at room temperature)
  • 1/4 teaspoon Cream of Tartar
  • A dash of salt
  • a scant teaspoon of vanilla
  • 1 Cup of Sugar
  1. Mix the first four ingredients until they form soft peaks
  2. Gradually add in the sugar until firm peaks form (it should be shiny)
  3. Then lay them out on parchment paper on cookie sheets in circles with an indention in the center (think shaped like a nest) like this: (I was out of parchment paper, so I used the inside of paper bags like my mom always did).   nest2
  4. Serve them with ice cream, fresh berries, and coconut (for added flair my mom always dyed it green with food coloring)

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Happy Easter!!

Valentine’s Day Cards

One of the many many things that my parents did right growing up was Valentine’s Day.  For us growing up it was always about showing those people we love just how much we love them.  It was not about having a boyfriend or girlfriend, single or dating; just about loving the people around us.  One of the key ways they ingrained that in us was having a Valentine’s Box with red, pink and white paper, doilies, stickers etc for us to make Valentine’s cards for each other.  I remember being a very young child and sitting down with my mom to do crafty cards to tell my brothers and dad just how much I loved them.  To this day I still have several cards that my family gave me.

My mother almost always writes clever poems on hers (she has an uncanny ability to write clever poems) and my older brother has a tendency to find appropriate comics to send.  We always exchange them on Valentine’s morning at breakfast Mom makes for us (stay tuned later in the week and I will share about that).

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When I got married last year a couple of great family friends threw me a ‘holiday long distance shower’ for all of our family friends who live far and wide and wouldn’t be able to make it to a shower for me, and the theme was Holidays.  I got some great gifts that I have used throughout the year to decorate for various seasons and one of the great gifts I got was from my second cousin and her family.  They also have a Valentine tradition of making cards for each other and they gave me my own box full of cute Valentine’s cards and stickers!!

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My cards this year are not particularly clever or creative, but its the thought that counts right?! I bought some calligraphy pens and ink right before Christmas (seriously wasn’t Christmas just yesterday??)  and I’ve been trying to improve my calligraphy skills… I have a ways to go!

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Some years I am good at still sending them, and some years I am not, but I love that even as adults we occasionally still send the card to share how much we love each other.

The washi tape is an easy way to spruce up an otherwise simple card:

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What are your Valentine’s traditions? Do you guys make cards for your family?

A Swedish Christmas

Have you been enjoying the week of posts about mom’s house at Christmas? If you are just joining us here’s what you missed: the best of her nativity collection, the most bizarre nativities and her two Christmas trees!

And for the final post of the week I’m showing off her Swedish Christmas decor!  I mentioned earlier in the week that she hosts a multitude of people every year at Christmas at three separate Christmas parties all in one weekend.  Over the last few years she has picked a theme for her parties and this year it was a Swedish Christmas.  I am not mostly Swedish by percent, but as far as the heritage that has been celebrated in my life, the Swedes have been the strongest.  My great-grandfather was full blood Swede and my extended family all settled into a small Swedish community in Kansas.  So my mom and all her sisters grew up in a very Swedish community full of Larsons, Johnsons, and Isaacsons.  And so the Swedish traditions have stuck around a bit, we have tea ring (a breakfast roll) at many family gatherings and several members of my family decorate with the Dala Horse and straw decorations that permeate traditional Swedish decor.

So for her parties my mom collected some of my family’s decorations to supplement her own and we lucked out and found the little straw goats at Ikea for (you guessed it) super cheap.  Here they are all packed up in her suitcase like a miniature goat army:

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She bought one of those little goats for each person at her party for favors and used them as napkin rings on her plates.  (I wish I had a good picture of it because it looked really cool with all of them lining the tables, but alas, her guests actually took their party favors home, so I didn’t get a photo of them).  She served at two tables, the first is in the living room:

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The centerpiece of each table was a candle tree surrounded by greenery and goats. And those cute trees with the red berries might just make their way to my house sometime soon…

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And look she even has nativities hanging on her candle trees:

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These cute wooden ornaments are very Swedish and I love the little St. Lucia ones.

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Her kitchen table looks very similar to the dining room table but has a little bit more blue on the candle tree:

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And here you can see how she used the goats as napkin ring holders:

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And last but not least she had the three goats guarding her drink station:

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And that’s how you decorate for A Swedish Christmas! Mom served Swedish Meatballs, Tea Ring, dill potatoes, Potatis Skorv (a type of potato sausage dish) and ostakaka with She also served a non alcoholic glogg to drink.

I love the Swedish Christmas tradition of St. Lucia and as a kid always wanted to walk around with candles on my head, but unfortunately my parents thought maybe that was a disaster waiting to happen.

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