A Culinary Christmas Friday Five!

Some toothsome questions from the RevGalBlogPals :

Favorite cookie/candy/baked good without which, it's just not Christmas.
That's got to be the family-recipe sour cream sugar cutout cookies. (I'll post the recipe at some future date -- they also make yummy Valentine's Day, Easter or other cookies.)

Do you do a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, both, or neither? (Optional: with whom will you gather around the table this year?)
In my family, growing up, Christmas Eve dinner was more of a graze, because of the hustle-and-bustle to get to church on time...after church we'd come back to break open the stash of Christmas cookies and more cold-cutty, fingery noshes. We then had our "big" meal on Christmas Day, usually at an aunt-and-uncle's house. This year I am being swept up in Fellow Traveler's family Christmas extravaganza, which includes a Christmas Eve Mexican fiesta-style meal at her place, and a more American-traditional Christmas dinner out of town, at her sister's. (My contribution to this endeavor is going to be, unsurprisingly, cookies.)

Evaluate one or more of the holiday beverage trifecta: hot chocolate, wassail, egg nog.
I have to say that, out of the three, I love the eggnog -- that's perhaps strange for a chocolate lover to admit, but it's true. Homemade eggnog rocks the house, but I'm good with the dairy-section variety as well. Now, chocolate eggnog...

Candy canes: do you like all the new-fangled flavors or are you a peppermint purist?
I -- ahem -- believe that candy canes of any kind are best seen and not eaten.

Have you ever actually had figgy pudding? And is it really so good that people will refuse to leave until they are served it?
I have not had the pleasure of figgy pudding. I suspect that it's similar enough to mincemeat to lead me to refrain from partaking.

Bonus: Fruitcake: discuss.
My German ancestors are probably all rolling in their graves as I type this, but...I don't like candied fruit. Never have. (Citron is the worst...bleah.) I can't bear Stollen, much to the bemusement of my parents and other relatives, and I think that most commercial fruitcakes are best used to prop up the Christmas tree. However -- I have been known to take a nibble of Collins Street Bakery fruitcakes, which seem to have more cake in them, and also have mostly edible fruit therein. On the other hand, there are kinds of cake -- white spice pound cake with a generous dose of cardamom, ginger and even white pepper -- that I like, that other people probably find appalling. And so it goes.

I have been on hiatus, mostly, from blogging, simply because there is simply too much to do around here in the evenings (ever try using a laptop after making molded cookies? Not a good plan)...all may not be calm at Cold Comfort Cottage, but it's a much brighter Christmas than I could have imagined earlier this year. I'll be back more frequently after the Christmas craziness subsides.