Here's How We Stayed Merry in Argentina During Christmas 2020

Staying "Merry" during Christmas hasn't always been easy since we moved to Argentina, but we've been fortunate to have each other and some very dear friends to accompany us during the holidays. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case in 2020 for obvious reasons. But we didn't allow the pandemic, the extreme South American heat, the annoying neighbors or the usual limited water supply in our neighborhood from dampening our Christmas spirit.

Now if there's one thing you should know by now is that we love to decorate almost as much as we love to cook. That's pretty evident from the photos above. But we didn't want to make the same meals that we had in previous holidays like chicken, ham, Argentine barbeque or even international cuisine, like the Venezuelan food that we ordered last year from D'Lucas. So, after doing some brainstorming, we chose to make meatloaf with fried stuffed potatoes and rice for 2020. And everything came out delicious!

Of course, the hubs is the cook in the family. I usually just watch in awe, but this year, I decided to pitch in and help with what I could like cutting the vegetables and doing the frying. I even helped with the decorations for the desserts. 

Speaking of desserts: 

If I look a little frustrated in the photo above it's because I was! You see, I was trying to make Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer treats using Oreo's for the body, pretzels for the antlers and white chocolate pieces for the eyes. But the supermarket was all out of Oreo's so I bought a cheap version and ran into an issue.

The cookies barely had any cream filling, so there was virtually no space between the cookie pieces for me to slide the pretzels into. Fortunately, I was able to open them up to stick the antlers in. Then I closed the cookie pieces the best way I could. And as you can see from the picture below, they came out okay.

Right next to the reindeer cookies are two snowmen which we made with marshmallows for the body, pretzels for the arms and chocolate pieces for the buttons. For the nose we used orange food coloring. And then we used chocolate filled syringes for the eyes and mouth.

We also made this Christmas tree cake using cake mix and a tree mold. The aesthetic part was a combination of frosting, sprinkles and lots of love. But we also made another Christmas tree cake a few days earlier, which is the one you see below. 

If you're wondering why this cake had ornaments and more decorations than the other cake, the answer is simple. The water (which cuts out quite frequently here) cut out half way through our meal preparation and we weren't able to finish a lot of the other desserts we had planned.

The photo above shows a wooden tray full of donuts, but we didn't make these. We ordered the strawberry and coconut flavored donuts from American Donuts on the 24th.

But like Halloween and Thanksgiving this year, Zach and I didn't invited anyone over just to play it safe. However, we did have a quick Zoom date with one of our friends. And earlier this month, we met up at Tucson to have a pre-Christmas gathering.

Of course, with any holiday preparation, things don't always go according to plan. Case in point, there was a certain local donut shop here in Cordoba City that claims to have perfected the recipe for delicious American donuts (NO! I'm not talking about the shop called American Donuts). Sadly, they failed miserably, but I'm going to share our horrible experience with them and the name of the shop in a separate post. 

Another epic fail came from a series of food products from a brand called Fudy, one of which was supposed to be a lava cake. I'll tell you why this, along with their other products, were such a disaster in another post.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a decent holiday. Now, if you'll excuse us... We have to start prepping for New Year's Eve.