Chase the Setting Sun...

It's that time of the year again. The holidays are here. The Christmas tree is up (and has been for a couple weeks...haha). There is an eternal flame in the fire place these days. Thanksgiving is a few days away and you know what that means...time to bake some dinner rolls.

Since my Grandpa Garrison died a few years ago I have taken over the task of making the traditional holiday dinner rolls for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Grandpa made rolls for decades up until the last couple of years of his life. They were always a tie for my favorite holiday food tradition, right along with Mom's stuffing. For a lot of years I think I barely ate anything else at Thanksgiving dinner. I bite of turkey, a plate of stuffing, and about ten dinner rolls.

I always get a few messages each year from family asking how many rolls I'm making, usually with a hint of "If you don't make enough you're dead" in their voices. It really is a honor to make them. I think at this point making the rolls is my strongest connection with my Grandpa. They are always good for bringing a couple of my cousins to tears with that first roll of the season. It seems that biting into them brings back all the memories of "helping" Grandpa bake bread when we were little.

Along with the honor of making them is a little bit of fear. I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to these rolls. I'm always worried they are going to be bad, or even just not quite as good as Grandpa's were. What if no one likes them this year?

So far so good. I've only tanked them a couple times. The first two times I made them and only Courtney and I had those.

Hopefully this year goes as well as other years and I can keep those memories flowing with Grandpa's dinner rolls. Tomorrow, once again I will try and channel some of Grandpa's bread baking expertise and whip up two or three batches of rolls, about one hundred rolls in total.

I'll have a long day of work ahead of me, but I always enjoy the house smelling like fresh baked rolls, the Christmas tree lit, and the eternal flame burning in the fireplace.

What are your family holiday traditions?