The Christmas Mouse

You know how people say things come in three's?  Well, the Christmas Mouse has one-upped those people and has now reared it's creepy, cute, adorable head in my life four times in the past few years.  I feel that the entire story needs to be told in order for you to understand this recurrence of an unappreciated rodent. 

(As a precurser, I will say that the third incarnation of the Christmas Mouse is edible, thus appropriate to be mentioned on my food blog, but not in the road-kill sort of way.)

First, there was the store in the Outer Banks called The Christmas Mouse:  a year-round Christmas shop filled to the brim with holiday cheer.  While browsing the store, we decided to start a family tradition of buying a Christmas ornament to commemorate our trips together. 

Then there was the laundry incident.  A mouse crawled beneath a pile of dirty laundry in our old apartment's basement and was already dead when I found him.  Tim began calling referring to it as the Christmas mouse; I suppose because it was like a gift for me at the bottom of the dirty towels. 

And this year when Tim and I went to my parent's house to decorate sugar cookies, my mom showed me her latest edible creation:

A chocolate mouse made from cherries, almonds and Hershey's kisses.  Her friend (and my former science teacher) had made them and my mom thought they were so cute that she made a batch, too.  Tim and I looked at each other and immediately agreed that it was the Christmas Mouse once again showing up in our lives. 

To assemble a Christmas Mouse, she dipped the cherries in melted chocolate and used the warm chocolate as adhesive to attach the head (a Hershey kiss) and the ears (sliced almonds).  The eyes and nose were just little dabs of melted chocolate and the tail is the cherry stem. 

I thought the Christmas Mouse had come full circle, but he wasn't done.  This year, Tim and I went to a Christmas Eve service at the church where we got married, but we didn't realize that the 4:00 p.m. service was designed for children, complete with a puppet show starring Michael, a (Christmas) mouse who visited baby Jesus. 


It was the best Christmas Eve service I've ever been to.