A couple of non-traditional images of *my* Christmas season:

This is a sweet potato pie that just came out of my oven. It’s topped with toasted, chopped pecans that are, in turn, drizzled over with maple syrup.

On my Facebook page, I recently suggested I was trying to discern the difference between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie. One person responded by saying that sweet potato pie *was* pumpkin pie, “and then it wakes up from its best dream ever.”

Hardly. The real difference is that you can make a sweet potato pie from scratch with few hassles. Pumpkin pie? Not so much. Assuming you can find a sugar pumpkin for the pie (which you can’t), you then have to clean out the nasty sucker, cook/steam the flesh in some manner and go from there. With sweet potato pie, you basically make mashed sweet potatoes, throw in some eggs, milk/yogurt, sugar and seasonings, mix it together and you’re there. *Fresh* sweet potato pie, as a result, is the best dream ever.

I used Alton Brown’s Good Eats sweet potato pie recipe for this, by the way. It uses yogurt and a whole lot of egg yolks. The recipe says you need a stand mixer to make this, but you don’t. Your basic Braun hand mixer/blender works fine.

Here you have the Old Town Alexandria Eagles Club (technically the Fraternal Order of the Eagles Aerie 871) in full Christmas party mode. I did a gig there Saturday night. I’ve played here a few times and it’s always fun — in part because it reminds me so much of being a kid, when my dad would occasionally bring me to the VFW hall in my home town.

There was lots of food and free drinks for the band, which is a good thing because this was a four-set, five-hour gig. This is a cell phone camera shot, which means the resolution isn’t the best, but I particularly enjoy the old guy sitting against the post at a table. He looks like a Scooby-Doo villain.