Most traditions come from your childhood.  It's how you've always done things, whether or not you remember why you all started.  One of our favorite family traditions for Christmas is new though.  Well, "new" by lifelong standards.  A couple days after Christmas the whole family packs into cars and heads to a new bookstore.  We disperse and spend time quietly wandering our chosen aisles, genres and authors.  Each of us is allowed to add one book to the stack Dad will be carrying to the checkout.  Of course, we are a family of book lovers and so we each line up behind him with the other book or two we just couldn't eliminate. ;)

This year, I decided to pick out a cook book.  Sitting in bed with a cup of coffee on a weekend morning, reading through the recipes and drooling over the lovely photos has become one of my most relaxing past times.

When one of my sisters (ahem, Kristin) saw I was getting a cookbook for my "Christmas Book" - she made some sort of reference to how she actually cooks from hers and should probably get one too.  I concede, I sit and look through my books far more often than I actually cook from them, but here is evidence, early on, I sometimes cook the recipes too.

This was delicious.  But beware, the Plenty cookbook does not give you "prep time/ cook time" in any collected spots.  All the little 10-15 minute parts for this recipe added up to over 2 hours... thankfully everyone at the Maple Leaf house are used to late dinners.  

In 2014, I'm going to cook more.  And I'm going to cook better.  As a way to care.