Momma's Miracles: Christmas Eve in Germany

Our country for Christmas Eve this year was Germany. Tessa is all dressed up and ready to head over to G&G's house. But first, I had her pose in front of her little tree she decorated. She is wearing a beautiful peacock blue dress. We used lots of peacocks in honor of the ones found in King Ludwig's castle.

Lubkuchen is German for gingerbread cookies. To keep up the theme, we took our gingerbread house to G&G's - think Hansel and Gretel. Those of you that were at our friend's gingerbread play date may notice our house looks a little different here. I couldn't go to the play date (notice there are no pictures) but Ryan was able to take Tessa and drop her off. She had a great time playing and eating candy, but not much candy actually made it onto the house. It was very sparsely decorated. I had been sad that I missed the event because I actually like making these sweet houses. So, another day, I whipped up a batch of icing and Tessa and I remodeled our house. We had a snow covered roof made of cut in half marshmellows, and red brick sides made of jellybeans plus snow people and even a snow dog in the green sprinkle grass. Two rounds of fun with one gingerbread house, yay! It was actually the second gingerbread kit that I bought because Anabelle had managed to snag the other one off the dining room table and ate the whole thing, cardboard box and all!

Once we arrived, we took pictures in front of G&G's peacock bedazzled tree. Isn't Tessa just so sweet with her Gamma?

Precious picture with both G&G.

We set up the tripod to get pictures of all of us.

Nanny was more than a little confused by everything. I helped her get dressed because she is having trouble picking appropriate clothes these days. I am so glad we captured this one with her smiling.

Back in the day, my grandpa was stationed in Germany and my grandma joined him there. While in Germany and after almost a decade of marriage (sound familiar?) my grandma finally had a baby - my mom. These were some of Nanny's happiest times. I have heard stories about Europe all my life but not just stories about the awesome palaces and gardens they visited or the parties they attended. Also stories like how she made extra money selling American cigarettes to the locals and how she almost burned the apartment building down because she was having so much fun playing with my mom that she forgot she was frying fish. So, while Ryan and my parents worked hard cooking dinner, I enjoyed watching old slides of Germany with Nanny. My parents transferred the slides to DVD format so we were able to watch them on TV. My grandpa was quite the photographer and the pictures he took are breathtaking. So much of Nanny's memory is gone but, on this night at least, she remembered and it was sweet.

And speaking of dinner, wow, what a meal! After much deliberation, the menu was set with sauerbraten, beets, spatzel, scalloped potatoes, asparagus and rye bread. The sauerbraten was marinated for three days before being wrapped in bacon, browned and slow cooked to deliciousness. Ryan sampled several different German beers, hefeweizen types being his favorite. Only Nanny can drink the super sweet German wine, the rest of us had imported wine.

For dessert, we had Black Forest torte and apple kuchen. The torte was courtesy of Strossner's, no sense in trying to improve on something they do so well.

The apple kuchen is a recipe given to my mom by a coworker years ago. I had never made it before but lately I have been ambitious in the kitchen so I decided to give it a try. As you can see it takes a lot of apples so that makes it healthy right? It was wonderful if I do say so myself. A cake with no icing is perfect for me, will definitely make this again.