"Valentine's Day is a Homemade Holiday, Really"

homemade holidays
hearts that I cut from red paper, using glue dots to attach to the inside of the kitchen windows-
-a fraction of the cost of commercial window decorations

Those were the words said to me by my daughter earlier today when we took a walk around the neighborhood and talked about this new month. Many people say that Valentine's Day is a commercial holiday, created and driven by storekeepers, florists, and greeting card companies. My family has historically taken a homemade approach to the holiday.

February 13, in the year my mother was 8 years old, my grandmother sat on the edge of my mother's bed, tucking her in for the night. After her bedtime prayers, my mother blurted out, "oh, by the way, I need Valentine cards for each of my classmates tomorrow." As moms, haven't we all had one of the these moments when our child informs us at the very last moment that they need a special X,Y, or Z for school tomorrow? (Mine was a princess costume for the 3rd grade play.)

After a moment of "ackkkkk!" my grandmother finished tucking my mother in and put her mind to creating some Valentine cards. As you would guess, this was back in a time when stores closed at 5 PM, so there would be no thought to purchasing cards. Even so, this was also during the Great Depression. Purchased cards for an entire class of schoolchildren would have been prohibitively expensive for my grandparents' budget. One thing my grandmother did have was oodles of creativity and supplies to match.

Friends of my grandparents owned a shop in town and had gifted my grandmother with their outdated wallpaper sample books. I'm not sure what my grandmother did with these books, but they came in handy this winter night. My grandmother stayed up till the wee hours of the morning, clipping and snipping the floral pages into fanciful shapes. At breakfast, my mother signed each lovely handmade Valentine. To my grandmother's satisfaction, my mother exclaimed upon returning home from school that her Valentine cards were the prettiest of the class. 

My own mother carried on a tradition of homemade holiday decorations, making cards with us when we were children, and handcrafting gifts. Perhaps this is where I get my own inspirations for creating holidays "from scratch" and now share with my own children. So, it's no wonder that my daughter would say that Valentine's Day is a homemade holiday. It's a legacy that was passed from my grandmother to my mother, to me, and now on to my own children.

Happy February, everybody!

Using Up Every Last Morsel of Holiday Treat Foods

Y'all know the saying -- waste not, want not. This is something that sticks in my mind. I actively try to not waste and to salvage what I can, whenever I can. I know that this is better for our finances and leaves more resources for the next person.

Due to our illness-interrupted holiday season, we are just now finishing off all of our edible treats. I know, most of you finished off goodies eons ago. But you may want to hear how we've creatively used some of our remaining treat foods

Here's what we're been using up:

There was less than a half-cup of eggnog left, plus it was over a week past the sell-by date. I used it in a batch of eggnog scones. Basically, eggnog scones are a regular scone recipe, with added sugar, nutmeg, and vanilla to bump up the eggnog flavor. The scones were delicious and prevented the waste of that last bit of eggnog.

My daughters made frosted sugar cookies just before Christmas. We finished the cookies but had a bunch of colored frosting leftover. Tired of not having some of my glass dishes and measuring cups, I decided to bake some scratch cupcakes and use up some of this frosting. 

I mixed the red, yellow and white to make a salmon color and used the chocolate frosting as is. I didn't have enough cupcakes to use the green frosting. I may freeze that to use for St. Patrick's Day or Easter. We've been enjoying the cupcakes, I have more of my glass dishes ready for use, and we didn't allow the frosting to linger long enough to grow mold or spoil.

We de-decked the halls Monday evening. I used more of the treats as part of our snack-y dinner just before putting decorations away. I had some pot stickers in the freezer leftover from New Year's Eve, as well as peppermint bark, holiday cookies, and spiced nuts to add to the buffet. I used a can of biscuit dough that had passed it's sell-by date to make broccoli, chicken, cheese mini pocket sandwiches. A large bag of frozen broccoli was nearly empty, leaving a large pile (close to a half-cup) of broccoli bits at the bottom of the bag. Those bits (plus a couple of chopped florets from a new bag) provided the broccoli for the sandwiches. I try to use all of what's in a bag of frozen vegetables, even the small bits that don't make a forkful on their own. The "cocktail" sausages are 2 all-beef hotdogs cut into quarters, leftover from last summer's cook-outs (kept in the freezer, of course). We had about 2 cups of cola at the bottom of the 2-liter bottle, leftover from our tree decorating party in December. So that went on the table, too. To round out the buffet, I added some carrot sticks, orange quarters, and pepperoni-pineapple mini kabobs.

What's left? Besides the green frosting, we still have some Christmas cookies, spiced nuts, Christmas candy, a half-dozen pot stickers, and about 1 cup of cola that I'll be repurposing in the coming weeks. 

So, this has been my effort to waste not, so that we will want not.