What’s on the Menu for Christmas? #weekendcooking

Last year for Christmas, my husband tried to give me the gift of organization by putting my clipped and printed recipes collected over the course of our long marriage into a binder. Or, I should say, he gave me the unfinished project with the promise of completing it after Christmas. (Or, oh God, was this actually two years ago?)

At least, that’s how I recall it. He might say he thought I would want to finish the project myself as I complained that he had included recipes I know I will never make (or never make again) and that having them immortalized in the recipe binder would only remind me of how much less energy I have nowadays. I don’t believe he said those actual words (“Well, finish it yourself, then.”) but he probably thought it.

ANYWAY, whatever year it was, I continued to clip or print recipes and stick them on the pile of unfiled recipes on top of my cookbooks. And when my mother was weeding her own pile of clippings and recipes that had been shared with her over the years, I took a stack of those, too, for old times’ sake.

When the new pile got too high to fit on top of the cookbooks, I took the whole pile and stuck all the loose pages inside the cover of the binder to be organized later.

But the pandemic. This second wave of shutdowns of activities and closures of places to go has really put the screws on procrastinators like me. For many of us, all the reasonable arguments for why we couldn’t start (or finish) projects during the first wave –”I’m just not used to this,” “I haven’t settled into the new routine,” etc. – have lost some of their logic over the weeks and months. Now, saying “I don’t have time for that” sounds perfectly ridiculous, even to ourselves.

So I actually started to complete the organization of the recipe binder before Thanksgiving, with the addition of pulling out all the seasonal and festive recipes I wanted to cook for the Thanksgiving weekend. It’s just a matter of priorities, right?

Didn’t happen. So I shifted the goal post to Christmas. Which is less than five days away. I had been imagining comprehensively organized menu plans for each day of the Christmas season, including gluten-free horseshoes to mark St. Stephen’s Day (Dec. 26th); shopping lists to go with the daily menus to be sure to have all the ingredients on hand; and a Weekend Cooking post early on Saturday morning showing off my menu planning and organizational skills.

Ha! So far, I have managed to go through the binder and mark some of the recipes for Christmas with Post-Its; start a handwritten list of recipes from my cookbooks that I want to make that are not in the binder; and, in a fit of crazy optimism, print several more recipes from the Internet this weekend that need to be filed in the binder. And… it’s going to be late Sunday afternoon before this post is up!

So in the interests of realism, here’s the project so far…

Actually, my husband wants to go with an Italian theme for Christmas dinner this year, so even if I still don’t have my act entirely together by then, we’ll at least be have turkey, vegetarian lasagna, and tiramisu. And he’s cooking! We’ll have all our traditional cookies and some new ones. We will try some new cocktails. The festivities may not be Insta-worthy, and we will miss our large family gatherings, but we will make merry, for sure, whether we’re organized or not!