Merry Christmas! Though we are far from home, our friends and family feel close in our hearts. We hope everyone has a joyous holiday filled with peace, love and good health. We miss you!!
It's a sunny and 52° Christmas Eve day here in Porto, but we are nestled inside our Airbnb baking, cooking and checking off our annual must-see Christmas movies. Baking is a little different in Europe, but we gladly accepted the challenge of metric conversions, limited baking tools and trying to find ingredients in a foreign language. We continued our Christmas tradition of making Peanut Butter Blossom cookies the other day. They were still tasty but looked nothing like the ones we make at home. The grocery store only had one chocolate that looked similar to Hershey Kisses, but to our surprise, they were filled with coffee, orange and strawberry creme! Luckily, we tasted one before topping our peanut butter cookies with them. Stores don't carry the vast assortment of holiday candies as they do in America. There is not an aisle devoted to red and green foil-wrapped treats. For example, if you want M&Ms, you can find them, but they will not sell only red and green ones.
Our one measuring device and Portuguese baking ingredients.
After days of walking all around different neighborhoods, I still am sticking with my original description that Porto has an ominous, moody Burtonesque feel. It's brightened by lots of holiday lights and Christmas trees placed in every restaurant and storefront. Downtown Porto is bustling with masked holiday shoppers and people patiently waiting in lines 2 meters apart to enter shops due to COVID capacity limitations. Portugal has had weekend curfews beginning at 1 pm for a couple of months, but they have lifted the curfews for Christmas weekend. I found myself shopping on Christmas Eve for the first time ever—my shopping is usually complete by the second week in December! I enjoyed pushing it until the last-minute this year as it added to the holiday festivities this week.
One of our many carb-loading bakery pitstops. There are no shortage of them here.
It took us a few days to find a store that sold Christmas decorations, but we found a Dollar Store-like one-stop-shop where we bought some merriments for our living area.
This Airbnb is one of our favorites with its floor to ceiling windows and beautiful woodwork and details. It's been a comfortable spot for the holidays.
The most common outdoor European Christmas decoration.
Kate received one of her Christmas wishes early—bangs.
Outside our Porto Airbnb. We have the second floor which is really the third floor. European floors start their numbering on the second floor.
Most buildings in Portugal are covered in beautiful tiles. This building looked especially Chistmassy.
