Merry Christmas 2008. It was a little quieter Christmas in the Koenig household this year. Preparation was a little off because I was out of town until 2 weeks before Christmas and then when I got back a series of strange events allowed the holiday to just sneak up on us. 
One of the strange things that happened is that I had to rehearse understudies for 2 of 4 roles in my show and put them on for preview... fun! Then, on the last good shopping day before Christmas we got 18" of snow. The bad news, no shopping, the good news, a good old fashioned snow day. We goofed around taking a family picture, dug a path for the mailman, hiked in the street a couple blocks to meet some friends for lunch at a pub in slogging distance! And eventually dug the car out so that I could go to the theatre to do my show. So, to catch up, we got everything taken care of for the holidays - the puppies enjoyed their reindeer squeeky toys, each of them got a little something baseball related and we had a wonderful Christmas eve doing some traditional cooking together. We made rosettes, which led to a happy accident in the discovery of an apple fritter recipe. Pete baked pumpkin and apple pies, and created some home-made braided dog biscuits. I made cookie dough for later baking and now, thanks to my Dad, we had my mother's ribs for dinner. They were just as wonderful as I remember.
Christmas day we spent at my sister's house and got to share little baby Gavin's first Christmas. Dinner was tasty and we had a very nice relaxed day. In a couple of weeks Pete's parents will be driving up to Milwaukee for a continued Christmas celebration. Merry Christmas!!
