Merry Christmas

Yeah, you read it right. I said "Merry Christmas," not "Happy Holidays."

This was my brother's first North Carolina Christmas. He has been elevated in status because my wife made him a stocking:

He made our Christmas Eve even more merry by bringing Ollie over, complete with a red collar. Christmas cat is a decadent yuletide treat.

I made some pain a l'ancienne, a delayed-fermentation bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice:

The dough sits overnight in the refrigerator. I made boules for Christmas dinner.

Here they are, fresh out of the oven (by the way, these pics were taken with our new, impossibly tiny, fabulously feature-laden digital camera given to us by Lindz's folks):

And here is how the boules were used. Bryan made a rich seafood newburg (full of scallops, shrimp and crab), and we put it in bread bowls. It was delicious, and it brought back memories of Christmases past. We drank a tasty Rutz pinot noir with it.

Bryan, in his Christmastime extravagance, made the mythical Bee Pie. Lindz has heard about this pie for years now, and Bryan decided to bring forth the legend so she could actually have some.

She liked it. By the end, we were full and dazed in that old-timey Noel way.