Getting Ready for Christmas

I am a planner, but I wasn't always this way. I use to get by (barely) by just throwing in some of this, a sprinkle of that and pray that everything turns out. I wasted a lot of time and A LOT of money doing this in my early days of homemaking. Christmas was especially bad but over the years I have tweaked a system for Christmas, especially for the huge amount of baking I do.

I do A LOT of entertaining over the holidays. We are invited to lots of potlucks and special activities but I don't always have the time to make homemade christmas treats for all these occasions. A few years ago I started the season with one big bake. I do all my cookies and squares and freeze them. If I need a quick tray of treats for a party I just pull them out and dethaw. The big bake doesn`t all happen in one day. I start with one thing one day and another thing the next. Sometimes recipes lend themselves to pairing so I do them together. I



The baking season begins when I sit down with my recipe books, and a notepad and decide which goodies I want to make. This year was especially interesting because I wanted to focus on recipes that were naturally gluten free. I did not want the added expense of tonnes of gluten free flour, especially for people who aren't necessarily gluten free. I needed recipes that would be good for my celiac husband and kids and yummy for our guests.

This year I decided to make:

Mint Fudge

Snowballs (White chocolate, almonds and coconut)

Nanimo Bars (with homemade, gluten free graham cracker crumbs)

Magic Bars (more GF graham crackers)

Mini Cheesecake (and again more graham crackers)

Sugar cutout cookies (our one and only recipe that requires flour. I will probably make two batches, a gluten free one and a regular one)

I also plan to make Christmas Cookies in a Jar for quick gifts for my daughter's Girl Guide Leaders, my son's Aikido instructors and the neighbours.

So with this list I wrote out all the ingredients I needed using tally marks to indicate the number of cups I need for each item. I'll need 5 cups of sugar, 6 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips, 4 cups of coconut and so on. This makes my page look super messy so before I go shopping I write out the entire list with a price beside it, indicating how much money I should spend on each item.

Then, I hit the shops. I am heading out this afternoon so when I get back I will debrief you on the success of my mission.