Marlene and Jesus celebrate their birthdays

On the 19th. we went shopping at several different grocery stores, rounding up what we needed for Marlene's birthday dinner, and Christmas dinner too. We got some nice vegetables but were not able to find seafood at any of the stores, so we decided to go the next day and shop at the marina.

The next day we went seafood shopping. To say we experienced sticker shock would be an understatement. The exact same seafood is available in Louisiana for 30% less. Oh well, we picked some nice sea scallops and some oysters, gritted our teeth at the cash register, and went home. That evening we lit the Hanukkah Menora.

Marlene's birthday we cooked up a storm, butterflying shrimps, breading oysters, and wrapping scallops in bacon. We enjoyed a feast fit for a king, or in this case a queen.

Over the next few days we visited the beach, where we got sandblasted by the winds. We also spent quite a bit of time improving on our rum punch recipe.

Christmas eve day, Marlene started preparing the traditional perogies. We dragged out our cassette player and listened to Ukrainian Christmas carols. Later, we watched Miracle on 34 st., and enjoyed the fruit of Marlene's labours. By tradition we watched Scrooge, the Alistair Sim edition. We toddled off to bed around 11:00, and a half hour later got an excited text message from daughter Miranda announcing her engagement to boyfriend Colin. An excited hour then followed with texts, pics, and phone calls. When we got back to bed we were too wound up to sleep, so we had a restless night.

We slept late on Christmas morning, then opened our gift from Miranda, a gift card for a cool looking tapas restaurant. We'll report back after our dinner there this week. The rest of the day was spent preparing the stuffing and turkey for Christmas dinner, and watching Its a Wonderful Life. We were so hungry by the time the turkey was ready we forgot to take a picture before carving. The dinner lived up to its aromas, and was delicious. I especially liked the stuffing!

If you are wondering about the title of this post, we saw a huge sign at a church that says "HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS"

The pictures above are Marlene in pre-birthday party mode, opening her gift from Miranda (pants), showing off the pants, the birthday vittles, lighting of the Hanukkah candles, our $5.95, ten pound turkey, Christmas dinner ready to eat.