We love taking time to make dinner, but we don’t often actually take time to enjoy dinner.

This is part of our 100 Things in 2016 challenge. Here’s the full list.

This Christmas eve, we’re in seafood country. The Willapa Bay region of Washington is widely known for oysters and crab, and although we’re not huge fans of oysters, crab is one of our favorites. We happened across a fresh-from-the-bay seafood shop and tried to get a whole one, but it turns out the season doesn’t start until next month. All we could get was pre-picked crab.

So we decided to make crab chowder. Tiny potatoes, cream, butter, crab meat, cheese, sour cream – these are what sweet dreams are made of. It was incredible. Our Airbnb hosts kindly provided most of the decor, all we had to do was light the candles and bask in the light from our fireplace (as well as that from the electric-yard-decoration Santa mounted in the window).

We put away our phones, put on some nice piano music, and chatted about happiness in Iceland and Moldova (our audiobook for this road trip is The Geography of Bliss). It was lovely.