Welcome to part 2 of my holiday blog posts! As you likely saw in part 1, our holidays didn’t get off to the best start. Things have only been getting better though, which makes us appreciate the good times all the more.

Opening Presents

Let me tell you, it seemed like forever for Christmas morning to roll around. This is probably my favorite day of the year. I love presents, and not necessarily even for what’s inside, but just for the pleasure of ripping them open!

Both Oakley and I were very excited to finally receive our first gift!

Which was a little bag of small squeaky toys and treats.

While I took the squeaky toy and ran, Oakley dug deep into the bag for the treat at the bottom!

After a brief moment of some hardcore squeaking on my part, I jumped back into the midst of things to help the others with their presents!

I am a really good unwrapper.

I get so into it that I start unwrapping everyone’s gifts before they even get to them!

My logic is that everyone’s gifts are indirectly mine anyway, so they can’t really blame me. Furthermore, I’m the celebrity of the house and therefore deserve the most presents.

And while I was ripping apart everyone’s gifts, Oakley sat patiently on the floor waiting for his next one.

As you’ll later see, he’s not always that patient though.

The next gift I received was this DVD on dogs by PBS.

I’ll need my thinking glasses for watching that one!

Then let’s see, I received these lovely wiener dog bed sheets from Mum!

I’m kind of thinking she more bought those for herself though..

Mum also gave me this nice scarf, which I think Oakley was a little jealous of.

His jealousy was short-lived though, because someone gave him a furry little rat toy which delighted him. He took it and disappeared somewhere with it.

Oblivious to his disappearance, I soon found this huge present addressed to me all decked out in dachshund wrapping paper!

I almost didn’t even want to shred it open.

Almost.

It’s a good thing I did though, because it was an awesome surprise!

It was a DJI Phantom Quadcopter specially designed to hold my GoPro camera!

Now you’ll soon be able to enjoy my incredibleness from the air! If you’re interested, you can take a look at this video made by someone else using this quadcopter in Bahamas – which is exactly where I’ll be taking it in April!

So while I was reveling in my new toy, Oakley was caught red-handed under the coffee table murdering his new rat toy!

All I can say is that he better not complain when he has nothing left to play with.

All in all, everyone was very happy, and me especially with my new toys (whether squeaking or flying).

Cooking Christmas Dinner

After letting Oakley expel much of his destructive energy, I recruited him to help with the Christmas dinner preparations. I dubbed him Sous-Chef Oakley.

I did not have an extra chef outfit around though, so he had to wear Mrs. Claus’ apron, which I might say was rather fitting for the occasion (and him).

Making this dinner was a big job though, which is why I was in charge with my thinking glasses. Again, my thinking glasses are not to help me read, but to help me think more sophisticatedly.

I had to coordinate the humans as well as Oakley in following the famous recipes of a certain Jamie Oliver.

I look forward to the day I have a cook book in my own name.

Although, I must say I don’t find Mr. Oliver’s recipes to be all that amazing. They seem to be extremely lacking in their use of butter, fat, meat, cheese and bacon.

In most cases I would have taken several liberties with his recipes, yet since I was cooking for humans too, I had to follow it to the letter. I wasn’t too happy about it, but we can consider this as brownie points with Santa towards next year’s Christmas.

But for the record, I would have swapped out that stupid stuffing with diced ham and bacon.

Anyway, I’m happy now that I have a sous-chef to help with all the boring parts of preparing Christmas dinner. And the first task I had Oakley do was peel the carrots and potatoes, and chop the onions.

I thought this task would be elementary, but Oakley seemed a bit perplexed.

At first I thought he was getting a bit emotional with his own frustrations of not knowing how to do it properly, but then realized it was just the onions that were making him teary-eyed.

I guess I can’t really blame him since he hasn’t gone through years of rigorous culinary school like myself though.

But I still didn’t have time to teach him everything I know, so I just told him to observe the humans and do as they do.

He did well by ‘watch and learn’, I can say.

But I was a little nervous to see him swinging that knife around. I had to tell him multiple times, “Oakley it’s a cutting knife, not Thor’s hammer! Be a bit more gentle would you?”

When he said he had finished peeling all the carrots, I took a look and was a bit surprised to see only a handful of carrots, but a mountain of peels. Some had obviously gone missing during the process, and I was sure Oakley had eaten some.

I turned a blind eye and just told him to peel some more.

When they were all ready, it was my job to soften them up a bit in a pan. I like carrots, but this still wasn’t a very exciting task – and I couldn’t very well trust Oakley with a hot stove just yet – let alone soft and buttery carrots.

But then as usual, Oakley started complaining that I was doing more than him and that he wanted similar rights in the kitchen.

So I gave him the simple task of putting the potatoes in the oven.

I was impressed to see that he wore his oven mitts without me even having to remind him! I guess I didn’t give him enough credit!

After that, I combined all the ingredients Oakley prepared into the stupid stuffing. What is the point of this boring mishmash of bread and vegetables anyway?

I consider it a waste of my refined culinary skills – but don’t tell Jamie Oliver that (he has a wiener schnitzel recipe that scares me a little).

But it wasn’t all boring.

I was the one who got to take out the Christmas ham from the oven, glimmering in its own juices and emanating an aroma of succulent pork.

I couldn’t help but lick my pork chops.

If only Jamie Oliver’s recipe wouldn’t have called for pears and cranberries, we could have said it was perfect.

Then the turkey came out. Oakley wanted to be the one to carve it, but I couldn’t entrust such an important duty to someone who’s already fallen for the temptation of something as trivial as carrots. Imagine what would happen to the turkey!?

So anyway, I did it, but even I couldn’t look at it squarely without feeling an overwhelming temptation to lunge at it and devour it.

The only way I could manage was by watching it out of the corner of my eye. I’ve never beheld something so memorizing – it was a true test of my patience.

Which soon wore off once I was at the table, wherein I demanded delicious morsels of turkey and ham while I sat at the head of the table (my permanently assigned seat).

I passed on the stuffing though.

If people like Jamie Oliver’s cook book, well then heck, wait till they see mine!

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and that you appreciated the good times despite the bad times!

Keep unwrappin’,

~ Crusoe

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