I'm getting really excited for Christmas. I love this time of year, and I really wish that the holidays lasted through January, the dreariest month of the year.

Every year I go to my mom's for Christmas Eve and my dad's for Christmas Day. I have no say in what I have at my Dad's, but I always get to pick the menu for Christmas Eve (which I suspect is because I have done the lion's share of the work making it since I was in upper elementary). Now don't think that my mom and stepdad are lazy bums; they work on Christmas Eve as they own a gas station/convenience store/pizza shop. They both work Christmas Eve morning, and my stepdad always works the evening shift so that the rest of their employees can be at home with their families. It's pretty dead in our little town on Christmas Eve after the early church services.

Anyway, we traditionally have potato klub as the main dish. Klub is a Scandinavian dumpling made of ground potatoes, flour, salt, and baking powder. You have to squeeze all of the water out of the potatoes before you can mix everything together because the dumplings are boiled, and if they are too wet, you will end up with klub soup instead of dumplings. Sometimes we put a piece of sausage or fat back in the middle of the dumpling, but I prefer to leave it out. They are boiled for 45-60 minutes along with a few chunks of onion and some sausage. They are served with lots of butter and are the size of baseballs. One will fill you up, and two will make you miserable. They are even better the next morning fried up in lots of butter for breakfast. Yum! I can't wait!

Also on this list this year: korv, creamed peas, and appetizers to hold us over through church and peeling, cutting up, grinding, and squeezing all of those potatoes. It goes a lot faster now that we have the grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aide. I used to have to attach the old hand-crank grinder to a stool and manually grind the potatoes.