Advent Day 14 and 15

"Make Nanaimo Bars"

As you can see, I used this advent deal to advance my Christmas baking agenda - but it does make it a lot more pleasant to bake when the calendar tells you so and not just a big cloud of guilt. I have made Nanaimo Bars every Christmas of my life - um, forever. My Mom even wrote "One of Kyla's favourites" in the notes for this recipe and I clearly remember holding a sweating, melting batch of these in my lap as I was driven to my first Christmas without family in New Zealand. They don't go as well with summer sun, I'm here to testify. But the point being, I always have a tin of Birds Custard Powder handy, just for this recipe.

Today's Advent was "Find a Volunteer Opportunity for the Holidays".
Obviously I wrote the list so I'm not exactly surprised but I was hoping that something would have occurred to me by the time I drew the slip of paper, something we could do together. I have always volunteered somewhere, which has been curtailed to one monthly board meeting and once a week at the school library while I'm in school - which I LOVE but I'm kinda racking my brains over what to do with this one. It's pretty hugely important to me to have Simone get the whole "give to your community" vibe from us and we could definitely step that up. Doing it in non-church setting is a plus. A one-off for the season would be a double plus plus, as I have enough guilt over undone work in my life right now - seriously, I bolted awake at 2 am last night consumed with guilt and could not sleep anymore.

As a token gesture towards this goal, I packed up some holiday baking for our CSA delivery guy today. He is very cute, sweet, grows our vegetables, wears Vans caked in red dirt and waits for hours in a cold van to give us our turnips. How could I not give him Hello Dolly squares?