It was not by a miracle that this vaguely Santa-like image appeared on my toast. Every year, my family designs and manufactures our own Christmas card to send out to our friends and relatives, and this year we decided to do a fake tabloid front page with sensational headlines about each of us. My headline was "Santa Toast Miracle!", which pretty much explains itself. Every once in awhile the virgin Mary or Jesus makes an appearance in someone's toast, grilled cheese sandwich, or pancakes and causes a stir in the religious world and on the covers of tabloids. I made this Santa toast by putting pieces of tinfoil over the areas of bread I wanted to stay untoasted. Neat trick, eh?
   
    Aside from this rather unimpressive, burnt piece of toast, I don't have a recipe to post. It's Christmas Eve, and we're having a bunch of relatives over for dinner tonight. My family has a sort of unusual tradition of eating New England clam chowder on Christmas eve-it dates back to the Great Depression, when my great aunt made up a clam chowder recipe and made it for Christmas dinner. We've been using her recipe every year since before I was born, but I'm not going to share that recipe because A) It's kind of a family secret, and B) It's not actually that great of a recipe. It's not bad, but it's not the best, either.  Posting just for the sake of posting is new to me, and I don't plan to do it much in the future, but today I wanted to share some of my family's traditions and wish everyone out there a splendid holiday.