This is Pioneering Today with Upperskagit's own Melissa K. Norris, inspiring your faith and your

pioneer route here in the beautiful North Cascade Mountains on KSvU 90.1 Community Radio.

Good morning. This is Melissa K. Norris with Pioneering today. And we're going to be discussing, we're finishing up our

part three series today on homemade replacements for processed ingredients. And today is our holiday

episode. I'm really excited to talk to you today about some of the different replacements that you can

use in a lot of your holiday cooking.

I love Christmas time. Christmas is one of my favorite seasons. I'm one of those crazy people.

My tree goes up. If not, Thanksgiving weekend, maybe even the weekend before, I like to start

putting my Christmas lights out. If we have a break of good weather, here in the Pacific Northwest, quite often we end up having really rainy, sometimes snowy, but usually in November, October, it's usually quite rainy.

We're actually having a fabulous run of weather right now, and it's sunny out, totally enjoying it.

So usually on a normal year, if it's the first part of

November and we happen to catch a sunny day, which is a rarity usually, then I'll go outside and

start putting my Christmas lights up on that day to be doing it in the rain or the snow. And I don't

necessarily plug them in, though sometimes I do. I'm usually the first one on our road that has the Christmas lights up and all the Christmas decorations but I just love Christmas it just comes once a year and I enjoy the family time and celebrating the birth of Jesus and just all that it represents and one of the things that I really enjoy about Christmas is holiday baking.

You know, there's, I kind of bake all throughout the year.

I would say that I prefer to bake over cooking dinner, though I end up doing both of those things.

But I really do enjoy baking homemade things from scratch.

And just when you walk into a house and it smells like freshly baked cookies or

fresh baked bread it just makes it feel more homey and i like oh i like to eat what i cook too but i

enjoy sharing it with other people and so that's one thing about the holiday baking is a lot of

the holiday baking that i do i end up giving out for gifts um to other people or you know you're

taken to different get-togetherethers that kind of a thing

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