It’s giveaway time! It’s a massive one guys and I’m pretty excited! For the past week or so I’ve been featuring recipes using Staub, Shun, Cuttingboard.com, Finex, and Kitchen Aid and now’s the time to finally bundle everything up and give it all away. Well, not literally, because you’re actually going to win new items, so there’s no real bundling, just figurative bundling.
win this staub!
I hope you’ve been following along – so far I’ve made Slow Braised Japanese Chashu Pork, Mini Puff Pastry Roses, Caramel Corn and Rice Krispie Mix, and Mint Snowman Marshmallows, but with these giveaway items you can make pretty much anything, which is perfect for the holiday season.
win this shun knife and cuttingboard.com boo’s block!
I love food – as I’m sure you know – and one of my favorite Christmas memories is of me, my brother, and Christmas chocolates. As little kids, come the first of December, we would get chocolate advent calendars. I still see them around now: those thin cardboard drugstore boxes featuring a Christmas picture with tiny numbered windows and chocolates hiding behind them. My brother and I lived for that moment at the end of the day when we got to pry open the cardboard for our long awaited treat. Our eager fingers would melt the chocolate ever so slightly as we tried to eat our chocolates as slowly as possible.
win this finex cast iron pan!
One year, we got it in our heads that we didn’t want to wait. We snuck our calendars down to the basement – it was cold and dark down there and I didn’t like it but my brother convinced me it was the best place to hide – and ate every single chocolate. We ate the entire month of December. And the thing is, we did it in a gentle, artful way where we could close back the windows so that at a casual glance, you couldn’t tell that the calendar was ravaged.
win this kitchen aid!
Maybe it was the sugar-high making us crazy, but we totally thought we got away with it. That is, until it was time for our nightly ritual with our parents. Needless to say, there was no chocolate treat that night. Or the next night, or the next. But, it was okay, because come Christmas morning, there were still presents under the tree. Apparently, our chocolate binge didn’t leave us on Santa’s naughty list, which was a huge relief, because, presents.
These days I’m more into giving than receiving so I couldn’t resist putting together this giveaway for you! I wish I could send everyone a Christmas present but since I can’t, I thought I’d do the next best thing and giveaway some of my favorite things. So, let me know your favorite holiday memory and maybe you’ll be the lucky reader who wins! Good luck!
Giveaway: I’ve teamed up with some of my favorite brands to do a massive giveaway. One lucky reader will win:
Staub 4 Quart Round Cocotte
Shun 6-inch Dual Core Utility Knife
Cuttingboard.com Boos Block Walnut 20×15 Cutting Board
Finex 10-inch Cast Iron Pan
Kitchen Aid Artisan Design Series 5-Quart Stand Mixer w/Glass Bowl in Pearl Silver
To enter: Leave a comment on the blog with your favorite winter holiday memory. I want to hear ALL the details! I’ll randomly choose a winner and notify them through email. Open to US residents only. (Sorry international friends, only American companies agreed to this one!) If you’d like some extra entries use the widget below to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Contest ends December 21st at 12pm PST. Good luck!
The giveaway is closed! I’ll be announcing the winner in the next week or so after reading through all of the comments. Thank you everyone who entered! There are some beautiful memories here!
Update: Congrats Chelsea, you won! Look for an email from me shortly!
Every year we have an annual Christmas party at my cousin’s house on Christmas Eve. It’s decked out with a HUGE table of Vietnamese food of everything you could imagine. It’s amazing. There would be friendly chatting, then a speech by my grandpa (he really likes making speeches) before every digs in and devours the food. Later, presents are opened one at a time from youngest to oldest (a terrible tradition that takes much too long.) It’s a simple night with a big family, good food, and lots of wine.
It was Christmas Eve when I was around maybe 8 or 9 years old. I stayed up all past midnight because I wanted to do something to surprise my parents. So using streamers (the types that had a similar thickness and feel as tissue paper) and a very long roll of tape, I decided to craft out letters to spell “Merry Christmas!” in a blockletter-esque font. And then one by one, I brought the letters into my parents’ room and taped it onto their closet, praying to God that the hinges wouldn’t squeak. I also decided to tape streamers of assorted colors onto their door so that they would walk into a delightful little surprise as they left their room. After the project was over, I went to bed with a satisfied grin plastered to my face.
Christmas morning, I found out that my dad had been extremely confused when he got a mouthful of tissue paper in his mouth while leaving the bedroom to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
My favorite holiday memory is every year decorating the christmas tree with my family. I’m 23 now and my parents still wait for me to come home every December until we all decorate the tree. We usually play Christmas music and my mom gives me and my siblings a new ornament for the year. Then we usually drink egg nog while we decorate. My mom unpacks all our ornaments and my siblings and I hang them up.
Favorite holiday memory is from last year – I have four siblings, and we’ve been out of our childhood home for a while now, but we always go back to my parents house for Christmas. This year is our first Christmas without everyone home (sister is in the Peace Corps in Namibia and can’t come home), so I’ve been thinking a lot about last year and how fun it was. My favorite memory is making breakfast on Christmas morning with my siblings. My Dad sitting in the chair reading the paper, my mom folding used wrapping paper and calling out “save the bows!” every few moments. My sister and I make homemade doughnuts – one of us slides the risen dough into the hot oil, and the other flips them over on paper towel and dips them in icing. My brothers make has browns and scrambled eggs. Everyone is in their PJs and probably will be until about 3 pm. Happiness, good food, and family. Nothing better.
My favorite memory is the Christmas before my husband and I were married. We went to NYC and had dinner at Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Tower. Afterwards we went on a horse drawn carriage ride bundled up with blankets and looked at the beautiful lights on 5th Avenue. So much has changed since then. But that night at Windows gazing out at the beautiful Manhattan skyline is one I will never forget.
Before the massive global warming we’re experiencing, it used to snow like crazy in Illinois, where I spent my childhood. We lived on a court, so the snowplows would make this huge mountain of snow at the end where they turned around. We used to build these crazy snow forts out of the ridiculous mound.
Merry Christmas!!
Ice skating on a lake near our house at midnight lit only by the moon. Laughing and too much wine with my family, cozy fires and waking up at 6am excited for Christmas morning to begin (even though I’m nearly 30…). And eating our traditional dish of red cabbage with chestnuts braised all day!
I have more vivid adult memories, but the childhood memory that is the most comforting is really more of a feeling I get. We grew up relatively poor, though my aunts and uncles were considerably better-off financially. So, throughout the year money was always tight. On Christmas morning, though, we would wake up to stockings in bed with us, and we’d sneak a peek into the living room. The room was always filled, like wall-to-wall, with presents. I can’t even begin to describe this feeling. It was a sense of wonder, plus sheer excitement. The magic of Christmas is still important to me. Going to bed Christmas Eve with the same amount of presents under the tree as on Christmas morning just isn’t as magical. Santa or no Santa, my favorite memory is the magic of Christmas. It’s hard as I get older and there’s no Santa to do it for me, but I’m still bringing a little of this magic to my adult siblings and our new niece.
My favorite holiday memory is more like a feeling; the feeling I had as a child of all the excitement and wonder the holidays bring. To this day, the glint of the Christmas lights on the glass balls on the Christmas tree can bring back that feeling. There was the Christmas parade, the school parties, the special programs on TV, visiting Santa Claus, going out and chopping down a tree with our neighbors and then decorating it, shopping for gifts and then wrapping them and watching them pile up under the tree and wondering what was in the ones with my name on them. We baked cookies with our Mom and would decorate them when they had cooled. There was also the candle light Christmas service in the school chapel that my Dad directed that reminded us of the true meaning of Christmas. So it was just the building excitement of the season and all the activities of the season that contributed to it. I grew up on the campus of a boys boarding school where my Dad was a teacher and choir director and my Mom worked as a secretary in the school offices. Every Christmas the headmaster’s wife would throw a party for all the faculty children (aka faculty brats!). We would draw names for a gift exchange and then at the party, there were all kinds of wonderful treats and we would run wild and play and then exchange our gifts. It was a big deal to me back then getting ALL the attention for that one day since the students and other school activities seemed to be the priority the remainder of the year for all the teachers and their wives. It was a different time and atmosphere for sure. But I always remember Christmas fondly from those days and love it when the glint of a light or the sound of a carol takes me back to that time if only for a brief moment!
My favorite Christmas holiday was the 1st Christmas after our 1st child(son) was born. It was so special to watch him crawl around the Christmas tree staring at all the lights and ornaments and screaming his head off when he was put in Santa’s arms.
Merry Christmas!