Today I have a special treat for you! My sister-in-law Tina’s family have become like family to our family and I thought I would have Lisa, Tina’s mom, share a little about their family Christmas celebrations! Lisa is an amazing hostess and completely down plays her spread in this post but you all know everything is bigger in Texas. So when she says “light and tasty” she means an amazing buffet of everything delicious!  Nothing light about it! Just to give you an example, these were “just cupcakes” Lisa made when we went to visit them at their lake house last summer!

Hi everyone,

My name is Lisa Dyer, and I am honored that Kristen wants me to write for her holiday blog.  Christmas is one of my favorite holidays, because it’s time spent with family and friends.  My husband, Craig, and I feel blessed to have the Seckinger family as part of our family.  Our only child, Christina, married Graham and now we’re one big family, creating new holiday traditions!!

You would think that having an only child would mean quiet Christmas traditions.  NO WAY!!  We always have big, loud get-togethers, combining my family and Craig’s family on Christmas Eve.  Craig’s mom and dad always very graciously hosted my entire family at their house on Christmas Eve. That’s a lot of extra people to include for the holidays, but this has created some of our fondest memories.  Last year, Craig and I were able to host Christmas Eve at our house.  We had the Dyers, the McClendons, the Holleys and the Seckingers all under one roof to celebrate.  We love that our families enjoy spending time with each other, and we’re so glad to be adding to our number every year as our kids get married and we celebrate together!   

The menu is always light and tasty.  We have queso and chips, along with stuffed jalepenos.  These are both Texas favorites!!  We also have a variety of dips and crackers, and Christmas sugar cookies.  Almost everything can be ready ahead of time, because we’re always more interested in spending time with each other and NOT in the kitchen.  The sound of my little brother playing his guitar and singing is always a pleasure to hear before and after we eat.

Santa always arrives on Christmas Eve.  The sound of firecrackers announces his arrival!!  The children run out of the front door to see what Santa has left for them.  The smoke from the firecrackers creates the illusion that Santa has left as quickly as he’s arrived!  We open our wrapped packages on Christmas Eve too.  As the presents are opened, and the wrapping paper piles up, everyone laughs, and enjoys being together!  As you can see from our pictures, we’re one BIG family!

The Dyer Family                                                                                  The McClendon Family

                                                                                                 The Seckinger Family

I am including a couple of our favorite Texas recipes for you to try over the holidays.  I hope your family enjoys them as much as we all do!!

Queso Dip

1 pound bulk pork sausage

1 medium onion, chopped

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 can diced Rotel tomatoes

1 large block of Velveeta

In a skillet, brown the sausage with the chopped onion.  In a crockpot, combine the sausage and onions with the can of cream of mushroom soup, the diced Rotel tomatoes, and the Velveeta.  Put the crockpot on high until the cheese begins to melt, then you turn it down.  It will be ready when you’re ready!

Sausage-stuffed Jalapenos

1 pound bulk pork sausage

1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, softened

1 cup (4 ounces) shredded Parmesan cheese

22 large jalapeno peppers, halved lengthwise and seeded  (Pickled peppers are hotter then fresh peppers.)

Ranch salad dressing, optional

In a large skillet, cook the sausage over medium heat until no longer pink; drain.  In a small mixing bowl, combine the cream cheese and Parmesan cheese; fold in sausage.

Spoon about 1 tablespoon into each jalapeno half.  Place on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake, uncovered, at 425 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until filling is lightly browned and bubbly.  Serve with ranch dressing if desired.

Yield:  44 appetizers

Sugar Cookie Recipe

½ c. sugar                 2 c. flour

½ c. powdered sugar        ½ t. salt

½ c. butter, softened      ½ t. soda

½ c. oil                   ½ t. cream of tarter

1 egg                          

½ t. vanilla extract

½ t. almond extract

Directions:

Blend together sugars and butter.  Add egg, vanilla, and almond.  Mix dry ingredients together and add to previous mixture.  Refrigerate at least one hour.  (I usually refrigerate overnight for easier rolling.)  Flour your surface and roll out cookie dough, cut out desired shapes, and bake at 350’ until slightly brown around the edges.

Sugar Cookie Icing

2 c. powdered sugar

2-4 T. Milk

1 t. vanilla

Food coloring if desired

Thanks, Lisa! We’ll be missing your Texas hospitality this year! Might just have to whip up some jalapenos to make us feel a bit closer!   Thanks for sharing some family recipes…and your family!

So any of you that know Seth and I well know that we aren’t very spontaneous. Although now that I am writing that and analyzing the 5 moves in 7 yrs of marriage I realize we might have put on a good front. Anyhow, we aren’t naturally spontaneous. We over think most things. And I talk myself out of lots of adventurous things.

But then there are the crazy drives we do…

Seth and I started dating in November of 2004. Soon after we started dating I went home to Houston for a month to work and he stayed in Dallas to work. We were so bummed that we had just started dating and now wouldn’t really see each other much. About 2 weeks into it I decided it would be a good time to go back to my apartment and “check my mail”. I had to work on that Friday until early afternoon so I decided that I could leave after work and make it to Dallas by dinner time to go out with Seth. The only catch was that I had to be back Sat morning for my mom’s church Christmas tea. Which was at 10 AM. Yikes. So I drove up to see Seth, we went for dinner and then drove around Highland Park looking at Christmas lights and then I went home, got a few hours of sleep and had to leave at like 4 AM in order to get back to the tea. Crazy, huh? But somehow it was adventurous and so worth it to see Seth! 10 hours of driving and all.

Then there are the drives we have done when we know a friend or family are here or there, not exactly on our home leave travel route but worth the detour!  We’ve been known to take rest breaks around meeting new babies and celebrating birthdays.  We added a couple days of layover on our way back to Switzerland last year because we just couldn’t be in the US and not meet our nephew James!  And a trip to Austin to hold my bestie’s new Annabelle! And quite a few more stops in between. If there are enough hours to make it work we try to, even if it feels a bit crazy for us not so spontaneous people. A couple of weeks ago I drove to Wilmington, DE for lunch with a friend. I told a friend I was doing it and she couldn’t understand why it was worth it to drive there, visit a few hours and turn right back around. It was so worth the time with her catching up face to face and seeing her life in action. It just isn’t the same over the phone.

This weekend we are doing another crazy Kolb drive! We got the itch this Fall to go to NYC and long story short we thought we could stay with a friend and make a weekend of it.  Our lodging didn’t work out but my brother and his wife were able to get a hotel and we couldn’t cancel the opportunity to see them in person in our neck of the woods (ie not exactly our woods but in our corner of the country). So, we decided to make a big day of it. Saturday morning we will load this kids up around 4 AM and make the trek. We will spend the day with them and then we will drive to a hotel outside of the city to crash for the night before making the drive back Sunday morning! But on the way back we will detour through Wilmington again, just because we can’t fathom passing our friends along the highway and not seeing them, even if just for a bit.

These kind of posts always get people commenting on how all of our moves and travel must make our kids easier to travel with. And I always feel the need to keep it real and let you know that they can be really tough travelers! They are 5 and 3 and human children after all.  The boys don’t know we are going and they don’t know that magical NYC will await them, or that they will see their Aunt and Uncle!

Call us crazy. We’ll be wiped out. But it will be worth it.

And there are no more crazy drives on the horizon…but we’ve had the itch to meet our niece Madeleine since she was born nearly a yr ago. Oregon is more than a brave road trip so that will be less spontaneous!

Here are a few pictures from our last week of summer!

summer legs….resulting in another black bath!

basil is always better from a friends garden!

not one bit tired!

cousins

hold on tight, James!

dance party

It was a really fun way to wrap up our summer with playdates and pool time and a family movie night and garage sale shopping and hanging a bazillion things around the house (more on that to come!)!

Since we will be stateside for a bit this was a treat to do one last homeleave before the next phase.  Seth spent most of his leave painting and working on the house but he snuck in a few fun days before that all began. You can click on the pictures to make them bigger. I haven’t learned how to do a collage and the thumbnails cut off some of the pictures but this was WAY too many pictures to put in full size and in a zillion posts. Sorry for the photo dump!

We started in Friendswood with Seth’s family! We made it to an Astros game which made Seth’s heart content. Oh yes, and he had some Whataburger too. What more could a guy ask for.

on our way to Ft Worth we popped in and saw our friends Bo and Leigh and their little girls! Their new home is so beautiful and was such a welcoming space!

Seth stayed in Ft Worth for a couple of days with us and then packed up and drove a penske up with his dad to get going on painting and getting the house liveable!  While he was away we went to the Ft Worth zoo, got spoiled with my moms good cooking, went to Glenrose, Texas to look for dinosaur tracks in the river at the State park, spent time with my brother and my sister-in-law Tina and weathered the heat of the Texas summer!   We also got to catch up with good friends from our old Dallas days!

part way through our time in Ft Worth we went away to my sister-in-law Tina’s family lake house in Possum Kingdon! On the wall of their kitchen they have a quote that summed up the weekend: “Home is where you treat friends like family and your family like friends”.

After our time in Ft Worth the boys and I headed back to Friendswood where we spent a few more days with Seth’s mom and had some great cousin time. It happened to be Jackson’s birthday so we celebrated there. I had planned to keep it REALLY simple and it was but Jackson started asking about invitations and friends and DADDY so by the end of the day our fun frozen yogurt outings with cousin morphed into a pizza/swimming party to lessen the blow of a birthday during a move.

These weeks were packed and exhausting but so fun too. I learned pretty fast that I don’t enjoy being a single mom and that it was very hard to be away while Seth was working on the house. I am so happy to be here now working together and making progress towards being settled!!