The First Snow Fell… and I Turned Our Home Into Christmas

There's something about the days right after Thanksgiving, the quiet shift from autumn's warmth into winter stillness. The house feels a little tired, a little messy, and full of unfinished corners after all the cooking, gathering, and fun we've had during Thanksgiving break. And now Christmas awaits us. Bins stacked in the living room, garlands spilling out, ornaments tangled, and the kind of clutter that only a homemaker knows how to turn into something magical. Outside, the kids are bundled up in their brand new snow, laughing and playing in the cold. Inside, I have a small pocket of time, actually a day or two, to bring a bit of beauty and comfort back into our home. So today, I'm decorating, cleaning, refreshing, and bringing our home into the Christmas season. We're starting where I always love to begin, and that's with warmth. A hot cocoa station. Every year, I reserve a corner of the kitchen just for making hot cocoa whenever we feel like it. It makes the kitchen feel special, it makes it feel like the Christmas season has begun, and instead of making a homemade powdered hot cocoa, I am putting up my favorite recipe and all the things that we need to make delicious, fresh hot cocoa. I'm going to start out by making some homemade beef collagen marshmallows. I love these because they're less sweet, and they're so good for you. So I start out with one cup of warm water, and to that, I add three tablespoons of beef gelatin or collagen. And you want to let that sit here for five minutes and let it bloom. I like to give it a little stir and work out some of those clumps, but I find if there are some clumps, it all works out in the end. While I'm waiting for that to bloom, I'm going to add half a cup of maple syrup. You can use maple syrup or you can use honey. Both are good. I think the only difference is they taste slightly different, but they're both delicious. And then I'm going to add two teaspoons of vanilla extract. The beef gelatin will gel slightly, and then it's time to go right onto the stove. You're going to want to bring it up to a steaming hot temperature, but not simmering or boiling. You see how it's just steaming? It's not simmering, it's not boiling. That's when you want to take it off and you want to add it to your maple syrup and your vanilla. Our collagen marshmallows are going to take a good 10 minutes to whip up. So while I'm waiting, I'm going to prepare the rest of our hot cocoa station. And I don't love super sweet hot cocoa, so I'm going to be making ours with chocolate salt and chocolate caramel salt, which is my favorite flavor of all time from my favorite electrolyte drink, Element. These collagen marshmallows are a perfect pair to go with a healthy hot chocolate or our Element salty chocolate. Once those soft peaks form and it kind of freezes as it's dripping off of the whisk, that's when you want to move fast and put it right into a parchment-lined baking dish. This is about an 8 by 10-ish. I can't think of a better pairing than collagen marshmallow sweetened with maple syrup and an Element hot chocolate salty, which has 1000 mgs of sodium, 200 mgs of potassium, and 60 mgs of magnesium. It's made with real cocoa and no sugar. It's best to get those collagen marshmallows somewhere where they can cool off and finish solidifying. And since it's pretty much an outside refrigerator, outside's the perfect place. And I'm going to finish putting together our station with some semi-sweet mini chocolate chips, cocoa. I love hazelnut chocolate flavor. There's some sugar-free chocolate syrup there. I like my hot chocolate deep, rich, full of chocolate, and even a little bit salty. I'm going to leave you guys with one of my favorite recipes. I have drank an Element every single day for the past two years, and I love them. This is my favorite way to enjoy it during the holiday season. And they've offered the Pioneer Home community a free sample pack of eight of their most popular flavors anytime you make a purchase while following my link. So go ahead and grab some for this Christmas season. Our collagen marshmallows are ready. It doesn't take very long for these to gel up and solidify. I like to sprinkle mine with a little bit of powdered sugar and throw them in a container. Although they are not as sticky as regular sugary marshmallows are, so you don't need a ton of powdered sugar. The kids are just barely coming in from playing out in the snow. It's only like 20 degrees outside, so this is a welcome treat. I'm topping them off with some sugar-free chocolate syrup, a little bit of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and boy, they're excited. Let's go make it. Then you get a candy cane. I go all emote all emote. I couldn't help but to feel overwhelmed at the task of putting up Christmas this year. I think a lot of that had to do with just the state of the home after Thanksgiving. The fact that it just really needed a good cleaning, and I feel like I'm just jumping into it decorating before I can get that deep clean. I'm trying to get some cleaning done as I go. I love to reset the house before decorating for a new holiday, but in this case, we're cleaning as we're going. How do you like to start the new season? Are there certain steps that you go through when you're setting up the Christmas decorations? Maybe you start yours before Thanksgiving, because you like to have it all done before the Thanksgiving break. I would love to hear what you do to jumpstart the new season. I'm just grateful that we're having a snow day. We have a little bit more time to kind of ease into the Christmas season right after Thanksgiving break, and it just gives me some time to reset. In the past, I've had more of a color coordination for Christmas decorating, and this year, I am throwing it all out the window. I want color. I just want it to feel more relaxed, and so the kids have decorated the Christmas tree however they wanted, and I just want it to feel comfortable and homemade and cozy. These are beeswax ornaments that my friend Becca has made. Some of them are made with clove and cinnamon and spices, so they smell just amazing. They smell like Christmas, and so I'm decorating with those this year. I'm hanging up lots of garland and lights, and I'm just adding color. I'm going to put one of these spiced beeswax ornaments on this garland. This is a little passageway between the dining room and the living room, and I thought it would be so lovely to smell those spices as you're walking by, and I thought it would be appropriate to hang this little piggy who's munching on some watermelon right above the doorway into the kitchen. It's so fun to experience the joy of Christmas through your kids and how everything is so magical for them, and like I said, I just want things to be a little bit more laid back where anything goes, and so it's been fun to let the kids get more involved in decorating, and when things don't have to be perfect, it just allows for more relaxing moments and less stress. So here's cheers to a more relaxed, stress-free Christmas. I love how simple these beeswax ornaments are. They're made with 100% beeswax. They smell like honey, and if you want to get some for yourself, I'll put a link down for you below. My friend Becca has the cutest shop. She's married to a beekeeper, so it's just the cutest little love story. Her store is called Wild Hive Love, and I'm decorating with tons of her beeswax candles and ornaments this year. I'm gonna pause decorating for a moment just to get dinner started. I know that when all those cold little red faces come in, they're gonna be hungry, and I'll be so glad that I had something started. And when there's thawed meat and an instapot, there's a way. So I'm gonna put this beef chuck roast and sear it off in the instapot on the saute setting, and I'm just dumping in cumin and chili and garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, some smoked paprika, a little bit of sugar. I'm gonna chop up some onions and an orange and kind of go with a barbacoa beef dinner tonight. Pull out some tortillas and just whatever toppings are in the fridge, I'm gonna pull them out, and we'll have some barbacoa beef burritos. So super simple. I'm just throwing it all together here. And you know what would make this even better? If I had a little bottle of Coke or Pepsi. That makes for such good carnitas, or in this case, barbacoa beef. I'm also gonna throw in a little bit of dried cilantro and oregano. And since this chuck roast is still pretty frozen in the center, I'm gonna put it in for an hour and a half. Having all of this said and done, an hour and a half would have been perfect if the roast hadn't been frozen in the center, and I think it could have used an extra 15 minutes just to get it nice and tender and falling apart. I've carried the bins up into the extra room, so all of that is finally out of the living room, and I can't tell you how relieved I feel just to have all of those boxes put away, and I can finally get to the point where I'm vacuuming and cleaning up all the small pieces off the floor, getting the cushions straightened out, wiping things down, and I can finally set up my nativity scenes, which just remind me what the season is all about. I have this light blue nativity set that I put on my robin's egg blue piano that I stained years and years ago, and usually I set some books up here to elevate it and cover that with some fake snow or lights, and this year I just didn't bother with the fake snow, and I set them up on top of these colorful books, and I think it looks pretty, and like I said, I'm just really feeling laid back and bringing in all the colors. The sun goes down so early these days, so here it's already dinner time. It feels like it came so quickly, and like I said, we're pulling out whatever toppings were inside of the fridge. Avocados, tomatoes, can't believe those tomatoes are the ones that still came from our garden just in November. Sour cream, cheese, onions, whatever we could find, and it's just a really quick and simple dinner. I want to thank you all for joining me here today as we're preparing the house for a cozy laid-back Christmas season. I can't wait to hear from you all down below in the comments, and you can find the element hot chocolate there, and Becca's wild hive love candles and ornaments. I hope you'll give her a visit, and I'll see you all next week for, in this case, more Christmas homemaking. Loving lots.