Whew what a day! I mean I wanted to get quite a bit done and well let me just say ‘oh yea’ I got most of it done. And I even got out of bed Late! I didn’t wake up until around 8:00 this morning and by the time 8:30 rolled around, I knew that I better get up and get some stuff done. Now sometimes this works on the weekend – and well sometimes this doesn’t. But for today it did! First things first – review my list that I made last night. I needed a couple of Christmas cards still wrote out even though it’s cutting it pretty close. Next thing was to order the rest of the gifts from the internet. Yup, cutting this also too close right? But what I ordered had a 2 day shipping so it should be OK. Well on to paying bills and calling the cell phone company why our bill just seems to keep going up and up. What I found out today is that there is around $22 just in taxes on the phone bills alone. Now that’s just plain crazy! After a couple of loads of laundry and cleaning our bedroom, I moved on to watching a TV show that I like. Now I didn’t say that I wanted to work all day did I? The show is one that I’m kind of addicted to and I watch it on Netflix so I can miss all the commercials. Thank Goodness! After I limited my TV show watching time to 45 minutes, I’m back in the kitchen. I want to have some candy made so we can drop it off at our friends house yet early this week. Now I knew what I wanted to make and found myself not making any of it just yet. Do you know what I made instead? Well I ordered some beeswax the other day and I was just dying to make some lip balm with it. Yea, maybe kind of a sad life that I’m that excited about this beeswax huh? I’ve never done anything with beeswax or honestly even talked about beeswax before so when I went to order it I wasn’t sure what to buy. What I bought was organic food grade so it should be just fine. The reviews were good on it, so I gave it a try. Now if it wasn’t ‘good’ I wouldn’t have a clue 🙂 First things first. Do some research on which recipe that I’m going to use. Well there’s like 85 billion recipes for lip balm (who would have guessed?) and I chose the easiest one. The recipe takes three ingredients, coconut oil, vitamin E, and beeswax. I had the coconut oil in my kitchen so that wasn’t a big deal. I had bought the vitamin E earlier from the Coop store because I knew that it’s used in lip balm, and I had the beeswax now. Yup, I was ready to go. 
I put some of the vitamin E on the bottom of my glass bowl 
and added 2 Tbsp of coconut oil. 
Then I grated 1 Tbsp of the beeswax 
and put the whole thing in the microwave for 30 seconds.
If it is sounding easy, well it was up to this point. After 3o seconds I took it out and stirred it and put it back in. After a couple of times doing this, everything was melted and that was that. Way easy. Now I know my container is not the right one and it’s just in a bowl for now, but I didn’t know even if this was going to work at all.
I’m going to see what I can find for a smaller container and melt it back down again. It should work and if doesn’t – well I’m only out 3 Tbsp of ingredients. No big deal. After my kitchen experiment on the lip balm I started to make some candy and treats for my baskets. First thing was the almond coated pretzels, 
then peanut clusters,
and then two batches of caramels
The first batch of caramel was done so fast in this one kettle and the second one took about an hour longer. Same recipe – just different kettles. The kettles that I use are old pressure cooker kettles so you would think there wouldn’t be that much difference now would you? Well, the difference is about an hour to be exact. The caramel tasted the same so that extra hour didn’t make it better or worse, just a lighter caramel. The dark caramel will be left plain and the lighter caramel will have pecans in it and dipped in chocolate tomorrow.
Then guess what I did? Well Daryl fixed an outlet on the garage today that was painted over a long time ago, so after I greased up my lips with my new lip balm, out I go with my lights and decorated the garage. Now I’m done with putting up the lights because I know that soon I’ll have to take them all back down! After supper and getting the kitchen cleaned, it’s time to wrap some presents and get ready for work tomorrow. It was one of those days like when you were a kid and the Sunday lasted a long time. Now even though today is the December solstice and it marks the longest night and shortest day of the year – I’m thinking I was in a different zone or something because it felt like a very long day to me.
And the photo of the day is a platter that William brought home from one of the Christmas’s he was at this weekend. Yum!