Mrs. Osnow’s Class

My ideal holiday is being with my family and just spending quality time with them. Even though this happens only three times every year, (Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving) I try to cherish every moment of it.

My ideal holiday starts at my cousin’s house. There I see my aunts, cousins, uncles, and my grandpa. We then eat an appetizer, usually a delectable Croatian soup prepared by my cousin. It is a combination of chicken broth with steamed carrots, celery, and very thin yet succulent noodles. It really warms you up especially on a cold day.

After I play some sort of game with my sister and my cousins, we either play Monopoly or Candyland. (We play Candyland because of my 7-year-old cousin. He doesn’t exactly understand the point of Monopoly.) My cousin is literally the master at playing Monopoly. She somehow magically rolls whatever number she wishes. Also, because of her great sense of humor, she turns this usually tedious game into a benign, cheerful game.

Eventually, my sister, 7-year-old cousin, and I venture outside for a game of Hide-and-Go-Seek or tag. We use our Nintendo DS’ to message clues to each other to let us know where they are hiding This is probably the one of the best times of the day, because I get to spend time helping my cousin out with problems that he is having in school and answering questions that he asks me. It feels satisfying to know that there is someone who looks up to you. After about a half hour to an hour of this, we are summoned inside for dinner.

Dinner is another Croatian delicacy. It depends which holiday we are celebrating. For example, if it is Thanksgiving, we will eat turkey with stuffing and creamed potatoes. If it is Easter or Christmas, we will eat a Croatian type of steak, which is marinated in soy sauce, with mashed potatoes and lasagna. My cousins believe that dinner is the time to thank God for everything that he has done for you, therefore dinner is mostly eaten in silence.

After dinner, we are all extremely indolent and could literally fall asleep standing up with our eyes open! To try to keep this from happening to ourselves, we play video games. I challenge my little cousin to a battle in Mario Kart DS. It is imminent that he will beat me every time because he gets almost no homework at all; therefore he has all the time in the world to play it. Finally, it is time for dessert.

Dessert…definitely this is the overall best part of the day. Croatian desserts…the best things ever created. (I’m not kidding!) There are so many types of them! Candy, caramel, strudel, cookies, cake, walnut-paste bread, mini-apple-cakes…. Oh the mini-apple-cakes! They are a thin slice of some sort of apple bread covered in a coating that tastes like apple candy, with apple slices covered in the same coating, except it is thicker. You have to taste it to believe it. There is also the walnut-paste bread. This is again probably one of the best desserts ever. Walnuts are somehow ground up and transformed into the form of a paste. The paste is then ground up even more, and frozen. Once cooled, it is molded into a swirl inside a type of bread that tastes like a sugar cookie. After dessert…it is time to go home!

Leaving…the worst part of the day…after having a phenomenal time there, you almost can’t leave…your feel as though you could spend the rest of your life there, even though I would probably get bored with it.

However, there is one thing that I would never tire of, and that would be savoring the scrumptious Croatian desserts!