It's after Thanksgiving. I'm allowed now.

After cooking apple pie, pecan pie, cheesecake, rolls, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pasta salad, and eating turkey, frog eye salad, mashed potatoes, more pie, and after enjoying the company of friends and family, and after much thanks-giving...

It's Christmas time!!! I've already enjoyed setting up a Christmas tree, cutting out paper snow flakes, buying Christmas presents, making Christmas crafts, decorating an apartment all Christmas-like, and making the season's first Christmas cookies. Now please enjoy my favorite Christmas clip. Go ahead and watch it multiple times. I won't judge.





MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Turns out I'm a sucker for pumpkin

I love fall. Fall means pumpkin. Anything pumpkin is delicious. I love pumpkin, and I overdosed on pumpkin this week--from breakfast to dessert, and everything in between. I had it all, and I loved every last heavenly bite.

My craving pumpkin week started out with making pumpkin pancakes. It was no let-down.

2 c. flour
3 tbl. brown sugar
1 tbl. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 3/4 c. milk
3 eggs
3/4 c. canned pumpkin
1/4 c. oil

Combine dry ingredients. In 2nd bowl combine remaining ingredients. Stir milk mixture into flour mixture until slightly lumpy.

A day or two later, I thoroughly enjoyed pumpkin and sausage pasta. It hit the spot on every level.

Hitting the end of the week, I still had pumpkin left, so I ventured into realms of unknown recipes and made pumpkin blondies, only with butterscotch chips instead of white chocolate chips. The new recipe was far from a disappointment. I hit success.

In between I had tastes of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and "pumpkin jems," which interprates to be something about a pumpkin muffin with some kind of cream cheese filling in the middle. Slightly mysterious, yet definitely scrumptious.

In my perusings, I restocked my pumpkin recipe inventory. I found a recipe for pumpkin nutella swirl bread. There's also always the options of pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin oatmeal, the original pumpkin pie (Thanksgiving is just right around the corner), pumpkin roll, pumpkin chili, pumpkin hot chocolate, pumpkin anything and everything! Bring it on! It seems I ran out of pumpkin though. Oh dear.

The last batch of cookies is meant to be burnt.

Sometimes it's a torrential downpour outside all day, and possibly inside depending on the leak that may or may not exist in the roof. Sometimes I have no choice but to drudge my way through the typhoon to my classes on campus. Sometimes the bottom of my pants get soaked (ew.), water leaks through my shoes (gross.), dampens my socks, and results in the relentless cold feeling that eeks through my toes and body throughout the day. Sometimes school and life weigh on me, overwhelming me. Sometimes it makes me grumpy.

Here's what I should do on said days: get up with a smile and grateful heart while counting my blessings, grab my umbrella, head off for my day, and carry on with my responsibilities--homework, studying, class attending, the usual--all while enjoying the pitter-patter of the rain, and the colorful splash of umbrellas dotting the campus, focusing on the good things of life.

Here's what really happened: I scoffed at my idealistic image of the day while trying, to no avail, to keep my sopping umbrella from flinging water all over my clothes, my backpack, the desk, other people, the whole classroom (you get the idea). I half-heartedly attempted homework assignments until defeat was admitted, found a couch in a quiet corner to take a nap while waiting for my next class to start, came home to ignore the pulling tug at my conscience to study for the looming tests ahead of me, quizzes that need to be taken, labs that need to be redone (because apparently I didn't get it the first go around), and diagnostic reports that need to be written. Rather, I watched epic TV series (cough, cough...Prison Break), listened to Christmas songs (please don't judge), and made pumpkin pancakes and double chocolate nutella cookies.

Looking back on my day, I realized how utterly and hopelessly unproductive it was. That sinking feeling in my stomach began as I pondered the things I could have done, that I should have done. Panic began to overtake my conscience as I thought of the insanely late night ahead of me while I would try to compensate for the significant lack of hard work accomplished throughout the day. These were my thoughts up until I burned the last batch of cookies, up until I had a sudden dawning of inspiration, realization, or maybe just justification. Call it what you may.

Some things are made solely meant to break the rules of our guilty conscience. It's for our own mental health. We have to have days to recoup once in a while. Sometimes it takes a cold, rainy day to get us there. Sometimes we have to realize that we don't have to do everything, that we can't do everything perfect. Sometimes it takes a C on that hard studied for test, that forgotten important meeting, or that overdrafted check to get us to that point--to step back, see the big picture, realize it's not a big deal, and return everything to perspective once again. Sometimes your cookies are going to burn. That's what the last batch is for, and that's okay.

So you have a few slightly darker, crispier than the rest cookies. It happens. They're only a few in the whole batch of delicious morsels anyway.