Christmas is rapidly approaching...

...and I am not ready for it at all (yet). I think I got a little overambitious with my projects this year. Still, I hope to make lots of progress tomorrow on getting everything ready to go before family starts arriving on Tuesday (in between cleaning my kitchen and bathroom before we have a rockin' Major cousin party tomorrow night). It is going to be a busy next few weeks! For some reason, last year didn't seem nearly so busy even though we ended up celebrating Christmas early due to my in-laws taking us to Rome over Christmas and the week following.

Anyway, I have lots more exciting stuff coming up on here once I am not swamped in secrecy, including at least four crochet projects (two done, two still in progress). I am also hoping to help my sister in law make goodie plates for the neighbors sometime as well, possibly including candied almonds, festive cookies, and fudge. I'll post any recipes I end up using, of course.

But for now, I will leave you with the instructions for making one of my favorite holiday treats, chocolate drizzled pretzels:

Get some parchment paper or wax paper and lay it out on the counter. Spread out a bunch of pretzels on it. Melt some white and milk chocolate in separate bowls (microwave for 30 sec to 1 min, stir, repeat until melted). Dip a fork or knife in the melted chocolate and drizzle the melted chocolate over the pretzels. Repeat with both white and milk chocolate until pretzels are suitably covered to your tastes. Leave them be for a while (30 min to an hour should do the trick) and then eat them ALL. Mmmmm. (I tried just dipping the pretzels in the chocolate one year, but it didn't give me a satisfactory pretzel to chocolate ratio, so I prefer this method instead. Also milk AND white chocolate was by far the favorite of all test subjects.)

If you have some of the big fat stick pretzels, try dipping them in caramel, then milk and/or white chocolate, and then rolling them in chopped nuts, coconut, or sprinkles. Be sure to let each layer set before moving on to the next one (except during the last step, of course, otherwise the nuts etc. won't stick).