For the first time in years we celebrated Christmas at home. It was great to cook budni vecher, a tradition we started in Haarlem many years ago. It's a Bulgarian Christmas Eve dinner, made without any animals products like meat, milk or butter.

The main dishes we had were stuffed grape and cabbage leaves, various beans and a home made bread. The latter with a coin for luck, which fell to Sasha. Dessert was baklava from a Turkish store in Chapel Hill.

It was delicious and a lot of fun to prepare together.

Yesterday was an easy and relaxing day. This morning we woke up to a snowy world, around 4 to 5 inches of snow.

Making the surmichki.

Cooking them.

Budni vecher table.

Yours truly.

Baklava.

Our Christmas tree this year.

We still have no top yet... next year!

I had planned to work from home today, since many co-workers are out of office and it's very quiet, work-wise. Yesterday evening I decided to come in to assist a customer with their pre-holiday shutdown of their lab. It's a power savings initiative and using our product they automatically shutdown a large number of servers, which is pretty cool.

The phone call with them this morning went smoothly and I left the office around 2.00 pm.

At home the postman delivered a package, with a big smile:

"A package for Mr. Bosman?"

"Eh, yeah, that would be me" -- I was expecting a package from our headquarters, to replace my laptop screen.

"So, are you going to sign it as 'The Man'?" he said with a grin.

Cruise company Holland America Line will offer two nostalgic trans-Atlantic crossings next summer, re-sailing the classic itinerary from Rotterdam to New York City.

Holland America Line was founded as the Nederlandsch-Amerikaansche Stoomvaart Maatschappij and offered its first trans-Atlantic crossing from New York to Rotterdam in 1872. Thousands of Dutch immigrants arrived in the United States with ships like these in the 19th and early 20th century.

Holland America Line last offered a classic trans-Atlantic crossing in 1971. To commemorate this 40 year history, two here-to-there crossings are planned for 2011. Another cruise company, Cunard Line, still offers regular crossings with its ship the Queen Mary 2.

”Proud to honor our heritage”
"Trans-Atlantic cruises were the foundation of Holland America Line for several decades, and there's still a strong desire from today's travelers who want to step back in time and relive the celebrated days of an elegant crossing or follow in the footsteps of their ancestors," Holland America executive vice president Richard Meadows says in a statement. "We're proud to honor our heritage with these two special itineraries."

Stops in Cork and Southampton
Rotterdam’s nine-day trans-Atlantic sailing departs from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on July 3, 2011, and calls at the traditional crossing departure port of Southampton, England, before heading to New York. Dutch Chef Cas Spijkers is scheduled to sail on the July 3 crossing. The July 12 trans-Atlantic departure returns to Rotterdam from New York over nine leisurely days with a call at Cobh (Cork), Ireland, another time-honored stop on crossings of the past.

The line says the voyages will include nostalgia-themed dinner menus and entertainment, special guest lectures, and the presence of a temporary "museum at sea," among other crossing-related features.

Poster Holland America Line in Dutch, ca. 1880.

Poster Holland America Line, 1949. Images courtesy Holland America Line.

This year our company celebrates it's 25th anniversary, and the holiday party was bigger than usual. The people from our office were invited to join the celebrations in Somerset, New Jersey, so we had a fun two day trip.

We left on Thursday. Because it was snowing, I left an hour earlier to the airport than I'd usually do. I saw several wrecks on 147 and I40, but made it to the airport fine, just like my colleagues. The plane had to wait for two hours for de-icing, since RDU doesn't have a lot of experience with snow, and we arrived in Philadelphia around 12:30 pm. We had a Philly cheese steak for lunch, and after a few meetings in the office we went to the party.

That was a lot of fun -- the highlight was the band out company employees who were playing music; very enjoyable. Lots of dancing.

Yesterday we went to the office, and after a celebration lunch we travel back to Philadelphia. We got stuck in traffic there for 45 minutes, and we would have missed our flight if it didn't have a delay. There were a few scary moments when the check-in lady said that the flight was already closed, but the gate agent got all of us seat assignments, the last ones on the plane.

I was happy to be back in Durham on time, since we celebrated our two year wedding anniversary yesterday. We went out for dinner in a favorite restaurant.

Today I'm hoping to go to Somerset. It snowed here overnight, and while there's not a lot of snow on the ground it might mean a lot of delays. Let's hope our 9.00 am flight is still going!