Since I’m German, and German’s celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, I decided I wanted to do something nice on the 24th to preserve at least a little bit of my German tradition. (And since Patrick’s family takes care of the American tradition side.) Some traditional meals for this day are goose or carp, so we decided to try the goose this year. And to keep things in more of a European Christmas spirit we thought it would be nice to invite some of our Polish neighbors from neighboring West End! As we figured out they have several similar traditions to Germans, such as celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve and eating carp as the main dish.

It was our first time cooking a goose, but it really wasn’t too different from cooking a turkey. Here’s Patrick stuffing the goose with onion and apple slices…

Stuffing the Christmas goose

Look at that beautiful crispy brown goose!

Christmas goose

And here’s us devouring the goose. On the left is our brother-in-law Justin, then neighbor Darek, then his wife Ewelina. Note Ewelina is holding a glass of water! (Just for you Ewelina! :))

Christmas dinner with friends

With all the holidays, and this, that and the other going on it feels like on one hand we haven’t been very productive with the house, but on the other hand we did have extra days off were we were able to focus on some projects. I’ll try and post some of those soon, like progress in the bathroom, progress in the bedroom, and a little 4-night getaway between Christmas and New Years where we saw some inspiringly cute cottages. So stay tuned for those updates!