October Girlhood Giveaway
October 18, 2010 by jillnovak
Filed under Giveaways, The Girlhood Magazine, The Remembrance Press Blog
Five blessed ladies will receive a copy of The Girlhood Home Companion 2009 Christmas Issue and the “Make Your Own Holiday Recipe Notebook” workshop on audio CD with Jill Novak .
Here are the entry rules. Leave a comment here about some of your favorite Thanksgiving or Christmas recipe traditions. Tell why you like a certain recipe(s) and how it/they became traditional fare for your family celebrations.
If you blog or facebook, post your comments there as well, and link back to our contest. You can use the graphics right here for the contest.
Happy commenting and may the best posts win!
Jill & Eric Novak
I can remember going to my Grandma’s house for Christmas and guaranteed there would be a ham, although the best part of that was Grandma’s special Honey Mustard Sauce,that was always freshly made. I have wrote the recipe down since Grandma no longer hosts the Family Christmas, and am continueing the tradtion of Honey Mustad Sauce for the Christmas Ham. I now also have 3 daughters who love being in the kitchen,and baking is becoming a thing they love. We have made Shortbread cookies for the past few years during the Christmas season. I know they truly enjoy it for they are asking to make them throughout the year.
My grandmother Thelma Green, disliked cooking and baking. She never felt she was a “good enough” cook. Therefore, her specialities were limited, but every one was delicious. She made a delicious pumpkin pie, using a recipe off the can of plain pumpkin. Topped with whipped whipping cream, each pie slice was a savored treat after Thanksgiving lunch. She also had an easy to do pie crust that was flaky and delicious. My sisters and I still make pie with her pie crust recipe and always get raves.
My girls have already begun to ask, “Will you be making Pumpkin Roll?” It is definitely a family tradition for our holidays, both Thanksgiving and Christmas. My first taste of this delectable treat many years ago, before I was even a mother, on a visit to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving and I had to have the recipe! I made it for our next family holiday and all of our extended family was hooked too! I found myself baking into the wee hours of the night because we HAD to have Pumpkin Roll and everyone wanted some to take home too! I do love to bake, but this was really a little too much especially as our blessings began to multiple and my time began to dwindle. I’m still making Pumpkin Roll some 15 years later. Each of my children love, love, love it and our families still want to take some home. I wonder why we wait for the holidays and only make this treat for the special days. I guess if it were a regular thing all through the year, we may not like it quite so much.
Christmas has always been an extra special time at our house……from the time I was a little girl until today, as tradition I try to pass on to my three daughters. Our family makes a polish Kapusta (sauerkraut) soup every year to be served on Christmas Eve. The recipe has been passed from my grandmother, to my mother, to me! As my grandmother and mother has passed away, it is a special tradition that I cherish.
The biggest tradition that our family had was making Christmas candy to give as gifts. My favorite was peanut butter balls. My mother and I made these together and now I am teaching my son and daughter how to make them. We give them to friends and neighbors every year and usually have requests for more.
My favorite food traditions revolve around my Grandmother’s Norwegian Christmas cookies and my husband’s Yaya’s Greek recipes. I learned how to back some of the cookies from my childhood and we try to make them every year. And then I make Spanikopita from Yaya’s recipe. My FAVORITE way to have Christmas dinner is actually just a lot of appetizers. Because we are in full time church ministry, Christmas Eve is always very busy with services. So we sometimes like to just relax on Christmas and eat cozy, yummy food. Appetizers are very celebratory for me!
Last year, I made aprons for all the women and girls in my family and we all wore them in the kitchen while we cooked together. It was so fun!
Thank you for the chance to win! I LOVE Girlhood Companion.
No Christmas would be complete without saurkraut, my Oma always made her special version with lots of fried onions and now we continue to have it every year even though she is gone
One of my favorite traditions during the holidays is to make HOT MULLED CIDER. The fragrance just fills the air with holiday spirit! When I was younger, our church youth group went caroling. The last house we caroled for had refreshments for us which included hot mulled cider. It was a cold, cloudy day and all of our noses were red. This ladie’s home was nice and cozy warm and filled with the fragrance of hot mulled cider and gingerbread. It is something that I have always remembered. The welcome that she gave us, her lovely home, and wonderful refreshments created a lovely memory for me. As I am typing this, it reminds me to make time during the holidays to welcome my friends and family and carry on the tradition of Christian Hospitality.
I loved visiting my grandparents farm every year for Thanksgiving. In addition to all the traditional foods, she always added her homemade chicken and noodles! It was my FAVORITE!!! She made her own noodles with a special noodle cutter, which I received after she passed away. I treasure it, and her recipe for homemade noodles, and every Thanksgiving, you can bet that we will have a giant bowl of Grandma Hackler’s chicken and noodles on the table!!
My mpm used to make two very special cakes. One was a sheepherders cake with raisins and spices with a seafoam frosting. The second was a potato cake that was to live for. She made them for birthdays, Thanksgiving, sometimes Christmas and always, always took the spicey cake to the summer family picnic. My daughter makes a delicious pumpkin chiffon pie. And I try to make a mince pie every year os so, it is an old fashioned favorite. There is something about that sweet tooth that brings us together at the end of meal in an act of gratitude.
Would love to get my hands on some of these lovely products.
My favorite recipe? We love ambrosia and fudge. The fudge reminds me of my mother, the ambrosia my mother-in-law.
Yes, enter me!
As far as tradition in our house, we’re pretty standard!
Turkey, creamy mashed potatoes, sweet potatoe casserole, and green
bean casserole…with cranberries on the side!
Oh, and homemade rolls!
I also facebooked about this as well.
My family doesn’t think it’s Christmas until we make the chocolate covered cherries. My mother in law found the recipe early in her marriage and they have been a tradition ever since. The recipe makes around 250 cherries and we love to give them away to friends during the holiday season. We also have a tradition of a Christmas Eve party. We fill the house with friends, family, and all the appetizers and desserts we can think of. It is a fun time of celebrating Christ’s birth.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to enter the contest.
Our favorite traditional recipes are numerous. We have had to move our gatherings to our garage because of our large, extended family. Our 8 children invite many people, and we never know how many we will have around our tables. People (if they are able) are asked to bring their favorite Thanksgiving dish, and it all comes together beautifully! Plus, we can exchange recipes after tasting everyone’s favorites! What a blessed time we have and we are already so excited about November arriving!
Blessings to you and your family!
Judy
Thank you for the opportunity to enter this contest!
Our Thanksgiving traditions are numerous! We have had to move our gatherings to our garage(decorated with hanging white sheets and twinkle lights) to allow for our children to invite those in need. We never know how many guests will arrive, but it works out beautifully! We ask (if they are able) guests to bring their favorite Thanksgiving recipe. This works out wonderfully because we can exchange recipes afterwards!
After the meal, we move into the living room for fellowship and music/singing. What a blessed time! We are excited for November to come!
Thank you and bless you and your family!
Judy
Our family loves thanksgiving and always will. It is such a fun time for us all to spend really intimate family time together, and thanking the Lord for the ways he has blessed us!
We like to have green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, honey roast turkey, mashed taters, have an apple and pumpkin pie for desert, and light candles all around every, single, year!
P.S. I love your Girlhood magazines, and I do pray that God will continue to bless the ministry!<3
MY favorite Thanksgiving tradition is to make dressing balls. We also eat other traditional Thanksgiving fare, but making dressing balls is my favorite dish. It makes this dish even more meaningful because my mother in law used to make it for the family until she died. Now it is passed on to myself, my husband and our children. A perfect example of tradition to me.
One of my favorite traditions is decorating for Christmas on Thanksgiving and in particular, hanging the lights out side on the house and going out (in jammies) to look at them all lit up in the dark. My kids used to visit their dad’s house almost every Thanksgiving so to see their faces light up when they would come back from the visit to a “Christmas house” was always the highlight of my year! I also love Christmas caroling in the crisp night air, bundled up and knowing that there was a cup of hot chocolate waiting for me at home when I was though!!!
Oh! Sorry! I didn’t realize in my nostalgia that I was supposed to focus on the food aspect of the holidays – My favorite food tradition is making, packaging, and delivering Christmas cookies to our neighbors to show them God’s love. The type of cookie is not as important to us as deciding which kinds to make in the months before Christmas – sampling is important (gotta make sure that they are safe for people, ya know!) Last year, it was hermits, snickerdoodles, and ginger snaps – this years is still being decided, but peppermint snowballs seem to be in the running…
We have tofu turkey, cranberry sauce, rolls, sweet potatoes, and brocolli. Our favorite drink is apple cider that we got locally during apple season in September/October and froze to unfreeze and enjoy for the holidays. It brings back fun memories of apple picking and canning our apple favorites!
My husband and I have been married ten years. We are continuing his family tradition of making Christmas Cookies. Every year we involve the children in making the cookies. We send them to relatives and friends and save some for us to enjoy through the Christmas season.
Please enter me!
I love getting with family for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and I love my grandma’s chocolate pie!
My favorite memory is my mom making 12 different types of cookies for Christmas. We only had the special cookies at Christmas time. I have carried this tradition over to my family. We enjoy baking together. Then we get to decorate the cut-outs. We have been inviting friends over to enjoy this tradition.
We sometimes enjoy a Thanksgiving or Christmas brunch with just our family. Then, we will meet with our extended family later in the afternoon. My husband on Thanksgiving will place 5 kernels of corn on each plate before we begin eating. We go around the table naming something we are thankful for for each kernel.
My favorite memory is of my grandmother-Nonna-making her famous cornbread dressing for Christmas. I always got a taste of the “raw” dressing before it went into the oven, just like my mother always did when she was a girl. I love the smells of Thanksgiving and Christmas that evoke memories of sweet times past.
My favorite recipe is for Dressing (some call it stuffing) for our Thanksgiving. This recipe was my Grandmothers and she wrote it all out for me on a piece of paper when I was newly married. It’s one of the few things I have that has her handwriting on it and I treasure it. My Grandmother passed away almost 20 years ago, but every year when I fix the Dressing, I think of her and all the wonderful Thanksgivings I spent at her house. The Dressing is an absolute must in our family and I will pass it down to my children when they get married.
I made Christmas Wassail Punch from the time I got married (25 years ago)until my 3rd son decided that he loved the punch so much that he would takeover making it. It blesses me so much to see my children embracing our traditions and making them theirs as well. I know he will always have a crock pot of wassail in his home and it will remind him of his childhood.
Growing up in an Italian American family in the 1970′s meant that no holiday was complete without homemade lasagna. Our Thanksgiving dinner was especially elaborate because as Americans, we of course had the time-tested turkey dinner, with all the fixings and trimmings. But that was only after the first course of antipasto, then the chicken soup with the little meatballs, then the “star” course – the lasagna, and finally we had the “main” meal. Of course, most of us kids were pretty full by then. We waited in anticipation for the lasagna, which was a treat because it was very time-consuming to make, so it was only holiday fare, and the turkey dinner paled in comparison. The steaming hot casserole with Mom’s homemade tomato sauce, dripping with three kinds of cheese – ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan – the humble turkey dinner just didn’t stand a chance!
I’ve been baking my sugar cookies, chocolate kiss thumbprints & oreo-style cookies for years. If I don’t make them, my nieces and nephews get quite upset.
We have several food traditions at Christmastime. My husband’s favorite cookies are sugar cookies, so we love to bake some sugar cookie cut-outs and decorate them with sprinkles. We also love to mix up some yummy homemade Chex mix, dip pretzels and peanut butter crackers in white and milk chocolate, make up some homemade wassail and delicious caramel corn!! We also try to add something new every year or two.