My Holiday Survival Tips

 Hello. C J here. Christmas is a big deal in my family. We take a good two or three weeks for it every year. It goes well past New Year’s and into the next year. This might sound intimidating. It is. For those of you who have a marathon Christmas to do this year, I’m going to share my holiday survival tips. There are a lot of them. Most of them are food. The ones that aren’t food are beverages.

Tip One – Water

Number one rule, Christmas involves a lot of moving around and a lot of food. Stay hydrated. Take breaks for water, soda water, or milk often.

Tip Two – Caffeine

Even if you’re young and don’t drink coffee often, maybe have a bit of tea on Christmas morning. I have a rule. The more presents I open the more caffeine I need. It works. I survive all the way to Christmas dinner and sleep after without crashing.

Tip Three – Eggnog

I love eggnog. It can be made homemade. For the fancy version look at the TV show Good Eats and the eggnog episode. For the simple version, mix three parts milk and one part cream with a half cup to a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of nutmeg. Heat to combine in a saucepan and serve hot or cold. I take mine straight with no alcohol and ice cold.

Tip Four – Cookies

I make the best oatmeal cookies in existence. The best. I make them from a recipe I got off the internet years ago but I altered the recipe so much it’s really my own now. I’ll publish it sometime. They are the perfect Christmas morning breakfast, lunch, snack, or stamina meal. They are high in all the vitamins in oats as well as sugar and I like to put chocolate chips in mine. They are soft and the dark chocolate has even more vitamins. Fun fact, I hate porridge. Unconditionally hate it. I love steel cut oats but I can’t stand the texture of them in hot water or hot milk. I prefer to eat mine in cookie form.

Tip Five – Poultry

We make a full turkey every year with plates and platters of vegetables, mashed potatoes, cranberries and gravy. My family have been doing this since before I was born. This meal requires a team to eat. For those of you with a smaller team to feed I recommend roasting a whole chicken or, if you can find one, a Cornish hen. These are a single-person sized poultry bird that makes the perfect gourmet Christmas dinner for one or two. If you have three or more people, I would do a full roast chicken or just a small turkey. There’s a bird for any crowd.

Tip Six – Leftovers

Eating all that cold turkey meat the next day is a challenge. I like to make Boxing Day lunch out of leftover turkey meat. I cube a chunk of meat and mix it with leftover cranberries or cranberry jelly, some mayonnaise and some salt and pepper. I eat it on toast as a sandwich. It’s a very full meal. The bones you can turn into soup and then once the broth is done boiling mix in leftover vegetables and some of the meat. It is the best soup you’ll ever eat. Turkey goes amazing with curry, corn and sweet potato.

Tip Seven – Sugar Plums

This tip is extra. I’ve made homemade sugar plums. Again, the Good Eats TV show recipe is the best guide to this one. They’re expensive to make because of the number of dried fruits you need to make a batch and they’re strange but if you want the full traditional Christmas feast they are the traditional desert. I’ve made them once and only once. These days we just do homemade pie.

These are my holiday tips. Enjoy. And really, cookies.

C J Mcpherson