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Bottled Coca-Cola, now that's not frugal! Or is it? |
About a dozen Decembers ago, I got a pretty spectacular deal on a 6-pack of individual glass bottles of Coca-Cola -- 65 cents for the whole carton, after sale and coupons. I don't usually buy soda, but I was shopping for treats for our annual Christmas tree decorating party. My family was tickled by the individual glass bottles, so much so that I saved the empties to reuse for the next year. Every year since, I've filled the bottles with store-brand cola (this year -- Sam's Choice, 67 cents/2-litre), and we all get a good laugh over the mileage from that one great deal a dozen years ago.
One of our family's holiday traditions is to gather for a snacky dinner followed by hanging Christmas ornaments on the tree. One way to make any dinner festive is to simply serve all finger food for a meal. For this party, we eat our dinner in the room with the tree (Christmas music jingling and jangling in the background). It's a fun and festive time that costs very little, as most of the treat foods are either homemade or not-terribly-expensive grocery foods.
This year's menucarrot and celery sticks with dip
black olives
crackers
homemade cheese spread
sliced pepperoni
cocktail sausages in BBQ sauce
tangerines
dried cranberries
mixed nuts
spanakopita (which has been tucked in the freezer since my daughter's graduation in 2018. It's commercial and unbaked, so it should still be good.)
homemade peppermint swirl bark squares
cola in the recycled Coca-Cola bottles
As I said above, our snacky foods fit within our modest grocery budget.
For this year's peppermint bark, I gently swirled the 2 chocolates together instead of layering. As a result, the squares were less inclined to separate into white and dark when cutting. I like my peppermint bark to be minty, so I added about 2 drops of peppermint oil to both the semi-sweet chocolate chip portion and the white chocolate portion. I trimmed all 4 sides before cutting into squares -- DELICIOUS scraps! I can see that I'll need to exercise some restraint with these.
The cheese spread was simply some cream cheese blended with garlic powder, onion powder, and shredded cheddar. Very tasty!
(raising my cola bottle in the air) Here's to a healthy, safe, and blessed holiday season for all!