Merry Christmas to you all. I feel so honored to have you in my life, even though I haven’t met most of you in person. I write for you from my heart and I’m honored when you send such loving comments reflecting your love back to me. I know how busy you all are, yet throughout the year many of you have taken time to share your love with me. And to those of you who haven’t written to me, I know in my heart you are a SHE just like me and I love you.

Make your own beautiful bows for your Christmas presents this year. They're easy to make and when you buy satin ribbon from your local florist, the bows are very inexpensive.

Watch this DIY video and Pam will show you how to make them.

How would you like to enjoy eating all the holiday goodies more than you ever have before? This is the most wonderful time of year to make a decision to do just that! 

However, enjoying your food starts with paying more attention to a part of your body that you may have been ignoring for a long time; your tongue. We all know without our tongues we couldn’t speak, but we also couldn’t enjoy our food because that’s where all those taste buds are.

Once when my kids were teenagers we were sitting at the dinner table and I suddenly noticed the way we were eating. Everyone was scarfing, gulping, guzzling, gobbling, slugging down, chowing down, wolfing down and pigging out like a bunch of animals. You’d have thought we were all late to catch a flight!

Since words don’t teach as well as experience does, I decided to prepare a special meal for the next dinner we’d be eating together. I wanted to get their attention, without words, to help us all be more aware of this marvelous gift we have…our ability to really enjoy our food.

Here’s what I did.

Merry Christmas Mousketeers! What a great year 2016 was for Colby and me.

As most of you know, our family lives with a two-human household (Terry and Pam) and they don’t have kids at home anymore. That’s a concept Colby and I just don’t get. (I average six pregnancies a year and we’ve never had less than septuplets!) I’m happy to say that I’ve never had to suffer from “empty nest syndrome!”

Since we live in the state of Washington, everyone seems to be nutso, Seahawk fans with Seahawk flags waving on flagpoles and out car windows, and everywhere you look there's a human running around wearing a shirt with the number 3 for Russell Wilson or 12 for the fans that scream their heads off.

Of course Colby and I are Packer nuts and have cheese hats I made from packing material we found in the attic. Whenever we hear a game on, we race to our viewing holes to watch television with the humans, hoping it’s the Packers. When we retire, our dream is to go to Wisconsin and get real cheese hats made of cheese like the humans wear to the games!

In this video, which my husband Terry produced for a local ABC affiliate in Portland, Oregon, we took video cameras out in the field to find the spirit of Christmas. It was a spiritual trek and we found the perfect place. It's almost a promise, if you have one of these places near you, you'll find the spirit of Christmas too. This clip will get that Christmas glow flowing through you, so please take some time to enjoy.

 Edible "Indoor" Snowman

Imagine serving this hors d'oeuvres at your next party: A snowman standing more than a foot tall, on a platter surrounded by raw vegetables or cocktail crackers. Guests will wonder what they’re supposed to do with him, until they dip into his luscious "snow" or cut into him for a chunk of his insides. Then they’ll keep returning for more, until the poor snowman is left looking like his brothers Frosty or Olaf on a bad day.

Here’s the recipe which is just one of 75 recipes in The Phony Gourmet, which is now at a low clearance price of $5 plus postage and handling. This hardback cookbook originally sold for $15.

Cream Cheese and Garlic Snowman

Serves 15 party animals

1 8-inch round loaf French bread

1 5-inch round loaf French bread

1 round French roll

2 8-ounce packages Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese (original) softened

2 teaspoons Lawry’s Garlic Powder Coarse Ground with Parsely

1 teaspoon Lawry’s Seasoned Salt

1 teaspoon onion powder

1/3 cup milk

¼ cup instant mashed potato flakes

1 leaf red cabbage (snowman’s scarf)

1 baby carrot (nose)

8 peppercorns (eyes and mouth)

5 coffee beans (buttons)

2 cinnamon sticks (arms)

1 cardboard toilet paper tube (hat)

1 square of black felt (hat)

1 (15-inch) wooden skewer (spinal column)

1. In a medium bowl, mix together cream cheese, garlic, seasoned salt, onion powder, and milk until smooth.

2. Place the larger loaf of bread on a large serving platter. Frost with half the cream cheese mixture. Stick the wooden skewer through the middle of the large loaf. Stick the medium-size loaf onto the skewer to make the second “snowball.” Frost the second ball, leaving enough cream cheese mixture to frost the third ball. Stick the French roll onto the skewer for the snowman’s head. Frost, and decorate, using items suggested in the ingredients.

3. After the snowman is decorated, shake the instant potato flakes all over him. They look just like snow and are remarkably tasty with the cream cheese “frosting.”

The Phony Gourmet came close to being a cooking show on television, but my sister and I weren’t willing to live five months out of the year in LA. Our six kids needed us at home. This video is the open from the pilot show.

William James said, "Things are not as they are, but as we are." We really do see through the eyes of our own experience and each of our experiences is different, so in every moment, we see everything from the perspective of the mood we're in. It’s almost like we put on different glasses from moment to moment.

Have you noticed you can get in the habit of being in a bad mood? The good news is, if you can get into the habit of being in a bad mood, you can get into the habit of being in a good one! Habits are breakable and like any habit good or bad, it just takes desire to change. 

Using a timer to get out of a bad mood

I was doing some holiday shopping at Michael’s (the craft store) in the late afternoon when I heard a conversation in the next aisle between a mother and her six-year-old child.

“Oh, Mama, look at this!”

“Uh huh.”

“I love this!!”

“Uh huh.”

“I have one don’t I!!!”

“Uh huh.”

“You made it for me didn’t you Mama!!!!”

“Uh huh.”

“Can you make one for Sissy?”

“Uh huh.”

As I listened to the excitement and love for her mother in the child’s voice and the drone of her mother’s responses, tears welled up in my eyes. I thought about how many times I’d done the same thing with my children when they were young. After all, the holiday season meant I had a centerpiece to make, a decoration for the coffee table to think about, colors to consider, people to impress and not enough time!