Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

Christmas is a big deal around here. There are big Christmas markets, public concerts and events, and lots of Krampuses… Krampi… whatever. We did our little thing for Christmas too, in lieu of the normal “family stuff”.

We started Christmas Eve day with a grand plan for some cookie makings. Mary Jo particularly loves making and decorating cookies. It’s kind of weird making cookies without the normal tools… like a large metal mixing bowl, whisk, or oven.

There are also some localization issues to deal with. For instance, we wanted some almond extract to add some pizazz. Well, this is what almond extract looks like in Austria:

Yeah, that thing is super weird. It’s also nearly impossible to get the extract out of it! With repeated tapping and patience you can get nearly the entire 1/2 teaspoon called for by the recipe. We managed to get it out though, and the dough came together nicely. We of course rolled it out and started making cookies!

Joni is very sneaky with the picture taking.

Of course, so I am! HAHAHA!

It wasn’t just the almond making for an interesting day. Something about the ingredients led to… issues with the cookies.

It would have been awesome if the cookies came out like that, but as with my dreams of being the best rocket clown history has ever known, they fell flat.

You’ll also notice that we’re using our toaster over for this project. We could only get 4 cookies in there at a time. it worked fine, but it did take us quite a while to get them all cooked. We had them all cut long before they made it into the oven.

Random side note time! They don’t have chocolate milk over here. They have “cocoa drink” made with milk. We’ve tried it a few time before in its pre-mixed form, but we were adventurous, so we bought a box of the mix-in stuff.

It tastes fine, but isn’t very sweet. It really is more of a “cocoa drink” than a “chocolate drink”. They even sell a reduced sugar version of this stuff. Not sure how good that would be. There’s one thing about the package that’s a little… worrying. It’s got Russian on it.

Russian is just a freaky looking language. It’s so foreign, that I’m kind of scared of things that are obviously marketed and sold in Russia. How do I know there’s not a bottle of Vodka in there? Oh wait… that’s not a bad thing.

Hey, here’s a video recap of the blog post to this point! We’ve got our bases covered.

Step 2 was to decorate the cookies. We normally mix up some icing and go at it old-school, but we opted for the simpler, more straight forward, less messy approach this time.

We take our decorating very seriously. Just look at that concentration!

We produce some very nice

if not… terrifying, cookies.

Joni actually made that one. I just attacked her with it. She’s really the creative one in the family. For instance:

The best I can do is copy her work. Can you guess who did what?

With creativity comes madness though. She does cute and cuddly one second, then terrifying the next.

She’s got the creativity covered, so I brought the nerd. I stacked the cookies according to style to see what was the most popular shape for us.

Trees won with stars a very close second. Stocking were just a hair behind them. We made a grand total of 1 bell. Poor bells.

Here’s our finished products. The linked image is the original file, so it’s HUGE for maximum cookie detail viewing pleasure.

With decorating complete, it was time to “test” the results.

Surprisingly, they passed.

And by that I mean “they passed in a surprising manner” not “it was surprising they passed”.

After 5 hours of cookie making we left them out to let the frosting harden and returned to the room. We needed a break after all that! We set up our pretty little Christmas tree and threw the presents under it.

There’s a little spot for a tea light in there that gives it a nice glow in the dark.

We spent the afternoon watching The Muppet Christmas Carol on DVD that we managed to find here. Surprisingly good movie. Better than I remember it being even… and that’s a rare thing for a childhood memory.

Once that was over, it was time for our big Christmas dinner. We pulled out all the stops. We had a candle with dinner!

OK, so maybe not all the stops. We actually had potatoes, turkey schnitzel (that’s German for “thin chunk”), and a crazy sweet berry-gravy.

Dessert came in the form of cookies (obviously) and some fruit cake from The Zipline Show co-host Ben. Nummers.

I’m not sure why fruit cake gets such a bad wrap. Granted, it’s super dense, so this little ring has been feeding us for days, but still! It’s actually kinda good!

And that’s where the pictures end. We retired back to the room after dinner and kind of collapsed. By this time it was 8PM. We threw in another Christmas classic we found on DVD: Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. Yeah, that one. The only little issue is that it only had a German language track. It wasn’t that big of a deal because all the songs were in English. Whatever I guess.

That lasted about an hour. By that time we had to get ready to go to the big event of the evening. You see, there are a few big churches in Linz, the largest being the Mariendom. Seeing as how we were in a city with an old-style cathedral, we had to attend a mass. And since it was Christmas, we decided to attend midnight Christmas mass. We figured it would be crowded, so we showed up at about 10:15, a full hour before the choir performance ahead of time.

It was locked. We sat around for about 30 minute before they opened the doors. It wasn’t all that crowded until about 11:30, at which point it got pretty packed. We were happy to have arrived early. The ceremony was traditional Catholic fare with nothing out of the ordinary. Of course it was in German, so who I am to comment on if it was “normal” or not! A couple things did catch us off-guard. First, the place was freezing. With that much stone and open air I can understand why. They had heaters installed under the pews to take the edge off, but even with those we were pretty stiff by the end.

The second surprise came during Communion. In most churches back home, Communion is an ordered affair with ushers telling each pew when they can go. In this place it was less organized. There were about four people handling it. They took positions around the church, then everyone was free to just get up and get in line. It was a bit of a zoo, but actually flowed surprisingly well.

The ceremony concluded with some music and the large organ being played. That thing can output some sound. We stayed a bit to look at the nativity scene and listen to the organ. On exiting the cathedral, we found that it was snowing a bit. It had been pretty brown until then, so we were fairly shocked. It was a nice surprise, even if it all melted by the time we got back to the room.

We had sent out some emails to parents to try to arrange Skyping, but we hadn’t heard back. I called my parents to see if they would be available. We Skyped with them and my sister about half an hour. The plan was to call them at 8PM their time (2AM our time), then call Mary Jo’s parents at 8PM their time (3AM our time). We never got to the second part of the plan. Mary Jo was too tired to stay up. So, at about 3AM, we finally went to bed.