This Holiday Season … you’re the newlyweds and newly elected by your new family to do the next holiday dinner. You can still sail into preparing a family feast with ease if you organize your menu and ingredients beforehand.

With both members of your family working, you need to keep this meal as effortless as possible but still come up with a traditional family fare in a polished and simple manner. Not as hard as it looks! With a little effort and organization, you’ll pull this off and impress both your new and your existing family.

Let’s Talk Turkey Tips
• Make sure your turkey is fresh, or if it is frozen, completely defrosted
• Remove neck and organs from inside the turkey
• Wash the turkey in cold water
• Put olive oil in bottom of turkey pan
• Put turkey in pan (check before to make sure your turkey fits in your pan)
• Stuff the turkey
• Baste the turkey with melted butter. (Baste hourly)
• Put salt, pepper, and a small amount of granulated garlic on the turkey
• Cook your turkey 15 minutes per pound at 350 F
• A roaster with a lid is your best bet to cook turkey in

Dressing
Fast fixing tip: For convenience, cook the bacon, onion and celery mixture for the stuffing, perogies and brussel sprouts in one frying pan to save on time and clean-up.

• 4 slices diced bacon
• 2 cups diced onion
• 1 cup diced celery
• 10-12 slices bread (cubed)
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• 1 tbsp. poultry seasoning
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 1/2 tsp. Pepper

- Fry bacon, onions, and celery until golden in olive oil-Add bread, eggs,
butter, and poultry seasoning
- Mix well
- Add salt and pepper to taste

Brussels Sprouts
• For convenience, use frozen brussel sprouts as they are cut
• Boil the brussel sprouts
• Add 1 cup (bacon, celery, and onion mixture)

Perogies in Golden Cheddar Mushroom Sauce
• 2 cans cheddar cheese soup
• 2 cans golden mushroom soup
• 2 cans chicken broth
• 1 cup grated cheddar cheese
• 1 cup (bacon, celery, onion mixture)
• 2 pkg. Perogies
• salt, pepper to taste

- Put into a Dutch Oven or large covered casserole dish, add all
ingredients but perogies and mix well
- Make sure perogies are covered by liquid-Bake at 325 F for 3 hours

Gravy Mushroom Gravy
• Use the drippings left in the roasting pan after removing the turkey
• Add 2 cups sliced button mushrooms (fresh or frozen)
• Cook until mushrooms are cooked
• In a bowl, mix 1 cup cold water and 2 tbsp flour. Make sure there are no
lumps
• Add to mixture, cook 5 minutes on medium heat
• Add salt and pepper to taste

TIMETABLE
2 weeks before:
• Order a fresh turkey
• Make a shopping list
• Order flowers

1 week before:
• Make and freeze your dessert (or ask one of your relatives to bring
dessert)

1 day before:
• Shop for your groceries
• Set the table and decide what serving platters you will use
• Dice the onions and celery and put into Ziplock bags

5 hours before:
• Fry onions, celery and bacon
• Preheat the oven
• Make the dressing for turkey
• Stuff the turkey

4 hours before:
• Put the turkey in the oven
• Put together appetizers

3 hours before:
• Peel the potatoes, put into a pot with cold water and some salt
• Baste the turkey
• Put the perogies on to cook

2 hours before:
• Make the salad and dressing
• Turn on the potatoes
• Baste the turkey

1 hour before:
• Put out the appetizer tray
• Baste the turkey – if it is not brown enough, take the lid off and if it too
brown, cover it with foil

45 minutes before:
• Cook the brussel sprouts
• Cook the corn

30 minutes before:
• Take the turkey out and put it on a platter
• Make the gravy

I was not one of those little girls who played out her dream wedding with dolls or who knew what kind of dress she wanted since the age of 5. I never really thought about my wedding until I got engaged on December 23, 2008. Then, it hit me: I was going to have a wedding and I was going to have to plan it. Of course, I didn’t start planning it until 8 months ago because I wanted to enjoy being engaged for awhile first.

Planning things is a gift of mine, so I didn’t think it was going to be too difficult. I immediately started making lists and felt that these would keep me in check. They did not. I did not realize that wedding planning takes more than lists and that it encompasses using a vast amount of social etiquette.

This first thing that we decided was the date. Since my fiancé and I met on December 23, 2006, and he proposed 2 years later exactly, we went with December 23, 2011. A date that would eventually cause a number of dramatic issues. We chose this date because it was and is important to us. It will mark our 5 year anniversary together since the cold, snowy, December evening that we met. Simple enough, with a touch of romance and sentiment.

The second thing we discussed was the location. I am a Maritimer, born and raised in a small community in Nova Scotia where most of my family still lives. My fiancé, on the other hand, has lived in Alberta all his life. Now came the question of which family was going to have to fly across the country right before Christmas. Since I am rather frugal, and because I did not want a large wedding, we decided to have the wedding in Alberta to save ourselves the cost of flying and having to put our three pets in a kennel for a week. Besides, after looking into what it would take for me to plan a wedding in Nova Scotia while living in Alberta, I decided that I am rather fond of my sanity.

Then came telling everyone. With such a small wedding, we didn’t do invitations, we just sort of called them and casually mentioned that they were invited to our wedding that was a few months away.

That was an adventure on its own. Not only was I asking my family to fly here, I was asking them to do it just before Christmas. The response to that idea was, “Why so close to Christmas?”, “Won’t it be too cold?”, “Can’t you change the date?”. The date and location have caused a sort of snowball effect in our wedding planning, as you can imagine. But, we stuck to what was important to us. We have made some changes to our initial idea in order to accommodate our guests, but only to a certain extent.

Some people choose their date based on the availability of the venue, some people choose it based on a statutory holiday, some people simply pick a date at random. You have to decide what is important to you and your fiancé and work from there. If the venue is more important than the date you get married on, get it when you can. If you want your guests from out of town to have more travel time, plan it around a holiday. Whatever your reasoning behind the date, make sure that it is your own. You are allowed to be at least a bit selfish when it comes to your wedding, so use that while you can.

By Ben Rose

Let me start by saying that I love Christmas music. If I could only take 1 album to a desert island it would be a fight between an Elvis and a Chipmunk’s Christmas album.

That said, nobody who books me for a Party/Wedding in December wants to hear Christmas Carols all night.

My top 10 songs for holiday parties and weddings during the holidays goes something like this…

1) At Last, Etta James: This is the perfect first dance for a wedding or any couple in love.

2) Can’t Hurry Love, The Supremes : Get the party off to a great start; when we rock this one out, the dance floor fills instantly.

3) I’ll Be Home for Christmas: You can’t have happywithout sad, and this may be the saddest song of all time…if only in my dreams.
4) Twist and Shout, The Beatles: Even the Beatles turned to this one when the party needed a boost.
5) White Christmas: An obvious choice, but I like to speed it up into a fun ska number.

6) Brown Eyed Girl, Van Morrison: The most requested song in the book, but we don`t hold that against it.

7) Baby it`s Cold Outside: A witty, charming duet you can only play…when it’s cold outside.

8) Island in the Sun, Weezer: Counter-programming for the people that are sick of the cold.

9) Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Monty Python: A lot of people get depressed during winter (especially Christmas), and if my rocked-up version of this one doesn’t cheer them up nothing will. It’s also on my new album, Cowtown.

10) Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Lastly, the most beautiful song ever written. Whether the Bride is walking down the isle or the party is winding down someone will have a tear in their eye.

For more of Bens’ insights…http://www.benrose.ca