Christmas decorating and a book review

We will be drawing for the beautiful Return to Sunday Dinner book later in the day. I need to quickly set up a Hotmail account (or similar) for Coffee Tea Books and Me so the winner can e-mail me mailing directions.

I slept in this morning until after 9:00! Thanksgiving dinner was delicious but also exhausting. I certainly miss having an extra set of hands in the kitchen. The guys both loved the Thanksgiving plates I had found, which surprised me. I guess because the colors were quite masculine, even if each did have a picture of an autumnal scene on it. We had our meal mid-day to make clean up easier. Dinner was all leftovers. My husband judges the quality of the Thanksgiving meal by the gravy, which was the best I'd ever made.

First thing after breakfast this morning, I went around the house and collected all my autumn decorations. Most are silk autumn flowers, grasses, leaves, etc. purchased on clearance at Michaels one year. Almost everything fits into two Rubbermaid style containers, labeled for easy storage. The one large item (a "bouquet" of silk grasses in a basket) gets put on a shelf in the garage.

I had them all together before putting them away and they looked so pretty on the dining room table where I'd left the deep, dark red tablecloth. I figured I'd leave it on the table until I pulled all my Christmas storage boxes out of the garage. There are a lot of spiderwebs (ick), dust and such on the bottom of the boxes and I will be setting them on the table while choosing what I will use this year. Then I can just throw the tablecloth in the wash as I usually do (it never goes through a Holiday dinner without some type of stain!).

I'm going to put out my smaller decorations and probably my snowman collection today. Tomorrow I may work on the tree. I'll get help from my husband to put the tree together for me. When we lived in a large house with a large basement, I could keep the tree up and just store it until the next year. Space did have its advantages. :)

Now for the book review. I started reading Julie and Julia a few nights ago. Without a doubt, it is one of the most vulgar and horrible first chapters of a book I have ever read. I was shocked, and I'm not easily shocked (having read books I wish I hadn't before becoming a Christian). I guess because the contents were suppose to be about cooking so I didn't expect what I read. The young woman who wrote this book has the effe words a number of times in the first few pages, later describes pictures from a porn book she found in her father's dresser drawer one year, and the rest is just as bad. She's leading up to why she decided to cook the recipes in the Julia Child cookbook.

I finished one chapter and didn't dare go any farther. The remainder of the book may be why it was published, the idea of cooking all the recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year is a great idea. I wonder if some reviewers even read this book or if they just recommended it on the uniqueness of the premise. The writing isn't even good. This book was so dreadful, I had to pick up a couple of decorating books and look through them for awhile just to get the imagery out of my mind. So much for trusting reviews (I should have learned that long ago).

Back to a more pleasant subject, I'll return later in the day to post the winner!