Pennsylvania and Some Homemade Pizza Pie

Who knew that there are no Christmas songs that mention pizza? What kind of nonsense is that? There are songs about Grandma getting smooshed by livestock and Santa losing his ever-loving mind and Swiss Colony frickin' beef logs, but not Christmas pizza? Seriously, what is wrong with the world? Honestly, you'd think this was a religious holiday or some such balderdash.

Anyway ... we have like 3 pounds of assorted shredded cheeses in the refrigerator, because HEY YOU NEVER KNOW -- don't you judge me! -- and we're running out of room for essentials like hundred-year-old jars of cocktail onions and warehouse-club size vats of dill pickles, so we've decided to start, you know, using some of it. And since we can't really get a decent pizza in our little town, we decided to make our own.

I have a bread machine that I got for my birthday a few years ago, so technically we could have made our own dough, but we went the Boboli bread shell route because we figured (correctly) that it would be quicker and easier. Also, we wanted to give Shae a shot at "cooking," and even for a hyperactive toddler, it's pretty hard to screw up "painting" pizza sauce and sprinkling cheese on top of a ready-made circle of bread.

And it turned out to be a pretty darned good pizza, too. I mean, it's not gourmet wood-burning brick-oven pizza made from imported organic semolina and maiden-made fresh goat's-milk cheese or anything, but it was easily as good as frozen Ellio's, which everyone knows is the food of the gods. And Shae was pleased as punch that she got to "cook dinner," which was the point of the whole exercise, anyway. And then we watched "The Year Without A Santa Claus" and G and I wondered what the hell drugs the Rankin and Bass people were taking back in the '70s.

So, you know, typical day in our house.