Church Christmas Musical, Bring Treats…and Backup Treats

This post comes in two parts:  Part 1, insightful advice on getting through your kids holiday events with gluten-free treats  — until that backfires…which brings me to Part 2….Ugh.

Part 1:

It is time.  Time for our children’s Christmas/Holiday musicals and the socials (which involve treats) afterwards. Whether you’re Christian or Jewish or another religion that will be gathering at this time of year, you’ll find by planning ahead, these food moments can easily be managed and you may be able to spread awareness at the same time!

For me I started thinking about it on Friday.  I had to make some Christmas cookies, so I had some available for Sunday’s social after my daughters’ church musical.  I knew Saturday would not be a good day because we were scheduled like CRAZY! So I went through my cupboard and found the ingredients I needed to get some Christmas cookies going.

I made the dough, put it in the fridge for a few hours and then the girls helped me cut the cookies out and bake them.  It was a new recipe and a little crumbly (I’m going to try another new one soon)..but, all in all, they came out just fine.  Emma thought they were pretty tasty as well.

I made them so I could have them on hand and bring them to share at the social after the musical. There are two main reasons: I believe it’s important to be in control at moments like this. I want to make sure my daughter has an opportunity to have a treat like everyone else.  But not just that, I like the idea of other people trying gluten-free goodies.  They might just say “they’re not so bad…” or even better, “these are great!”

Part 2:

This plan is all well and good, but what if it works out too well?  So about two hours before heading to church I decided to make some gluten-free brownies to bring as well as, what quickly became, my dwindling batch of gluten-free sugar cookies.  I didn’t want to bring all of the brownies because I didn’t want to end up with extras and have cross contamination.  So I just put about 8 brownies on a paper plate and labeled them gluten-free brownies on a note on the outside.

I dropped them off with the gals working the cookie area well before the program started.  I gave them explicit instructions not to combine these with any other goodies because they were gluten free.

Well the good news is they didn’t…there was no cross contamination at all!  In fact by the time we got to the area where the treats were there were NO GLUTEN-FREE BROWNIES AT ALL! They were snapped up by others before Emma ever got one.  Lesson learned.  Stash away your own brownie, or hold onto the plate of gluten-free treats until you get in there to enjoy them yourself.  Emma was pretty disappointed, but luckily she brought a few cookies from our stash. So she did have something (there goes that back up plan — coming in handy again).

*I found this website for some Hanukkah treats.  But I found just searching “Hanukkah gluten free recipes”, I came up with several options.  While you might not use the exact recipe, the search results could help give you ideas on how to tweak your favorite recipe!  Good luck!

Tags: Christian, Christmas, church, favorites, Hanukkah, Jewish, recipes, treats