For Christmas dinner this year I was asked to bring our traditional salad.  Well by the time I was done making it it had a name change from Aunt Mildred's Salad to the Salad from heck.  the recipe calls for cool whip, condensed milk, strawberry pie filling, bananas, pineapple chunks (home canned chunks) and marshmallows.

1.  I had decided that I wasn't going to pay $3.50 for a can of pie filling when I had frozen strawberries in the freezer so I made the filling which wasn't too hard to do.

2.  Went to make the salad Christmas Eve and discovered that I didn't have any condensed milk (I wasn't going to battle the crowded stores at that time of day) so went online to find substitutes.  The first one I made used powdered milk and while it was thick like condensed milk the creamy texture was not there and it had an after taste.  Decided that the culprit was the powdered milk might have been old and was leaving the taste.  So at 4 a.m. I was making another batch using fresher powdered milk.  Still wasn't has smooth and creamy as the canned.  Back online to find another one.  Found one that used equal parts of evaporated milk and sugar.  Hooray I had the evaporated milk.  Mix and boil for 30 minutes stirring constantly.  Hooray it had the smooth and creamy texture and taste that canned had.  The next day the leftovers had a caramel texture and taste.

3.  Time to mix it all together.  Took the cool whip out of the refrigerator and discovered that it wasn't a full container.  No sweat just adjust the "condensed milk"  ratio (the recipe calls for an 8 oz container of cool whip and a 14 oz can of condensed milk).

The end product was good but different than the family is use to.  The pie filling was a little sweeter than the canned and more of a fresh strawberry taste.

Lesson learned  MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ALL THE SUPPLIES ON HAND before you try to do something on the eve of a holiday.

Mamajhk,  that happens to me all the time.  You would have thought that I learned my lesson after about the first 20 or so times it happened!  

My 'challenge' this year was dinner on Christmas Day.  The kids woke up about 45 minutes earlier that I had expected, so I was still in the mess of making cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  Hubby held them off while I finished.  After the Christmas tornado was cleaned up, bellies full of cinnamon rolls and kids happily playing with their loot from Santa, I decided it was time to make the pie for dessert then start cooking for dinner so we could eat between 3:00 and  4:00.  As soon as I started that, hubby decides it is time to go to the hospital to visit his sister our newborn nephew.  So, an hour and a half later, after the pie is out of the oven, we load everyone up and head out.  We drop off the kids at my parents, since they would not be allowed into the baby ward.  We meet our precious nephew and then head off to pick up kids and get home.  It is now 3:00 and the Christmas ham is still in the refrigerator patiently waiting.  Needless to say, dinner was a little late this year.  The ham was very good.  The potato dish was a little soupy due to my wanting to eat sometime before Christmas was over.  But, all in all, it was a very wonderful Christmas.  

It is all of the unplanned, unexpected events that make it more memorable.  No one remembers the perfectly planned Christmas that goes off without one single snag (is there such a thing, because I have never had one).  Every one talks about that Christmas when …….. happened.