Our Christmas Day starts out with our traditional breakfast, bagels and lox, capers, red onion, and cream cheese. This is washed down with a Schneider’s Brewery Tap 7 Hefeweizen. Having beer for breakfast is probably not what most people do but here is the story behind it. Maybe 20 or so years ago I accompanied John on a work trip to Munich. After arriving and in our jet lagged state, we stumbled into the Schneider’s in the morning while we were still on Pacific Time. We ordered some weisswurt, potatoes, and sauerkraut. Since we were at a restaurant known for its beer, I asked John what would be a good breakfast beer. We settled on Schneider’s Tap 7. It was slightly sweet and creamy. Perfect! Often hard to find stateside, we always try to have it with breakfast on Christmas.

Christmas breakfast of champions!

Since we had quite a substantial breakfast, we skipped lunch and had an early Christmas dinner. We spent the afternoon grazing on the leftovers from Christmas Eve and watching “Die Hard”. I cannot understand why this is characterized as a Christmas movie. It is mostly just violent.

Our daughter was in charge of dinner and she made a wonderful lasagna.

Lasagna

The story behind having lasagna for dinner has nothing to do with us being Italian because we are not. Way back when the kids were little I was frustrated with making traditional Christmas dinners that they would not eat. So I asked them what would they really like (and eat) on Christmas. They answered lasagna. So that is what we had and continue to have 35 years later (except when we have dinner at our son’s house where he makes a prime rib. Very delicious!)

Finally we had panettone for dessert. Two years ago the whole family spent Christmas in Florence, Italy. Downstairs from our apartment was the bakery, Forno Top. Since we were unable to procure bagels for our breakfast we opted to buy one of their fabulous panettone. Our daughter decided that she would learn how to make it for future Christmases. It is very involved with lots of risings and hanging the just baked panettone upside down so that it does not crush itself. It is about one foot high and filled with raisins and citron. Fabulous!

Panettone. Hard to tell from the picture but it is about a foot high.

Inside the panettone

Now for two days I have eaten and drunk everything that I could possibly desire. The scale says I am up about 4 lbs. Not surprising. On Saturday I will not continue eating like this. I will go back on my diet for a week or so and lose what I have gained. In the past I might have continued through the weekend and eaten more cake and the rest of the lasagna but not this time. I will post what happens next.