Christmas Celebration at Mary's Part I - Dinner

Mary, Fran, Dave (Meredith's husband) and Matt (Mary's nephew) had a fantastic Christmas dinner tonight, followed by presents, followed by pie.

My drive down was great for the first three hours, and then traffic and other circumstances conspired to triple the time of the last 90 minutes -- construction, detours, accident, a 7-mile crawl -- it was horrid, but I made it.

So here are the highlights of dinner:

Here's the table set for dinner.

Here's Matt cutting the bread. Mary got this wonderful crusty bread that is infused with rosemary. It was fantastic.

This is Dave holding the root vegetable salad that Fran made out of beets, parsnips, sweet potatoes and I don't know what else but it was delicicious and quite an effort as the vegetables had to be roasted, but we loved it.

This is Fran showing off Mary's salad which had kale, apples and I don't know what else but it was also delicious. I don't know if I've ever had kale, but I enjoyed it.

Here's my finished plate. Starting at the top with smashed potatoes (mashed with skins on), moving clockwise to kale salad, corn, pork tenderloin and gravy, root vegetable salad, rosemary bread. One word: YUM



And finally, here's Milo. I had given Mary a very soft knit lounger/kaftan as a gift. That's the maroon thing you see on the sofa. When Mary opened it, she remarked how soft it is, and Milo decided to check it out for himself, and very happily adopted it as his bed while we talked, ate pie, etc.