Blue Umbrella Official Thanksgiving_Christmas Issue-1 | Page 6

Christmas Traditions
A Bit e of Joy
By Er ica L.
Every Christmas my sister and I will take
pretzels and cover them with almond bark and
sprinkles. My two brothers are much older, but
we would do the almond bark pretzels together
when we were little. The youngest of my
brothers has come home for Christmas for
several years now and continued the Christmas
tradition. When he was not able to come home
for Christmas and help us make them however,
we would send him a container of the almond
bark pretzels.
The only limit to what you can make with
pretzels and melted almond bark is your
imagination. Two Christmases ago my brother
came home, and we started making our pretzels.
A new idea came to mind--why not make a log
cabin out of pretzels and almond bark? With this
new idea we got out a new bag of pretzels,
melted more bark, and planned our log cabin.
The pretzel/log cabin was a success and it was a
shame when we finally had to eat it.
This last year my sister made another,
much smaller, log cabin and my brother made a
sniper on top of a tower. I made less creative
items such as what I dubbed ?the lamp pole.?
Basically, I took a stick pretzel and dipped one
end of it in the bark and let that end dry flat.
Then I covered the other end. My brother and
sister may be more creative with the big items,
but I like to dip the traditional pretzels
completely in almond bark and cover it in many
different sprinkles. Some of our smaller items
are headphones, reindeer, and snowmen. The
fun never ends.
My brother is in the Army, and he is
currently deployed. We want him to be able
to celebrate Christmas with us and continue
to enjoy our traditions. In our ?Christmas
edition? of our care package, we are going to
put in several pretzels and some almond
bark. Once he receives his package, he is
going to call us and we will continue the
tradition together.
We do not know what wonderful
creations we are going to create this year, but
I am glad that I still get to do it with my
brother. I love doing activities with my family
and I cannot wait to start making pretzels this
year!