New Life Old Farmers

As our flock enjoys some ‘peas on earth’,

we wish you and your flock a most blessed Christmas.

Our own winter wonderland, the farm is gorgeous with only the red barns, trees and fences standing out in the clean white snow.  The snow has been falling for a some time now, so the reality of farm life (the mole hills and the animal poop) are covered and we can forget they are there until it thaws a bit.  I am looking forward to our first white Christmas.  So much has been and is a ‘first’ for me, the ‘firsts’ for this Christmas over laid upon the family traditions we’ve brought with us.

‘The’ ornaments are done.

Seen out of the corner of my eye as some craft queen on TV put these together when Number 1 son was just a baby 24 years ago, ‘the’ ornaments are important to me and important to the offspring.  They were one of the few items we managed to pack into the cars when we were told to evacuate last summer.  I don’t have carefully crafted scrapbooks for each child.  I don’t have up to date scrapbooks for me.  Divorce…made all of that..harder.  However, we have ‘the’ ornaments.  One for each child, each year and now a handful for My Loving Spouse with his kids as well.  Who knew when I began adding just one, then two, then three and four a year, that someday our tree would hold over 60 of them.  They are usually made before Christmas, but not always… the whole process is fairly forgiving.  For the most part, this year’s ornaments are celebrating a wedding and our new farm life.

As I was putting them together, reflecting on all the friends & family I’ve taught to make these, how grateful I am for our time together and how grateful I am for our tree which reminds me of a rich, full and blessed life.

PS: If you’d like the instructions for ‘the’ ornaments, just email me at ellen@newlifeoldfarm.com  and say ‘ornaments’.  I will be happy to send them to you.  Don’t worry about my selling your email because

1.  I never would

2. I don’t actually know how

I love sharing this and if you live nearby, feel free to stop by and we’ll do them together.

Dear Friends and Family in Southern California,

To all of you who wondered how I’d fare in my new snowy home, let me cry out to you as only you can understand.  I’m freezing!  Seriously, the last two days were in the teens (damn teens).  Like 14 degrees F and I think maybe the F stands for …. freezing, frigid or frightful.  In fact the only reason I can even write this is that we have pretty decent supply of Christmas cookies to keep me going and because it has warmed up to 36.

The problem is not outside, it is inside.  Remember, we are restoring our home, with an emphasis on the -ing as in not done.  A lot of the ‘not’ done parts are making the rest of the parts of our wonderful old home down right cold, really cold.  Even the Pastor (who comes from Southern California) stopped by to offer me hope and encouragement.

I know some of you are thinking, that winter hasn’t even officially started yet and are wondering if I have enough Christmas cookies to actually make it through.  All I can say, is… please send chocolate.

See’s Dark Chews…no nuts.

Thank you.

My Loving Spouse is in ‘hog heaven’, while The Teen and I are currently a bit leery of our freezer.  There is food (at least we’ve been told that it is food) in our freezer that we’ve never eaten, actually we’ve never even thought about eating it.  Welcome to country life!

My Loving Spouse has been talking about his mother’s pressed tongue now for weeks.  NO!  His mother did not press her tongue, but made cow tongue and pressed it.  Why?  Well, according to legend, because it is delicious.  I’ve mostly been nodding my head and humoring him about this subject.  As I do the grocery shopping, I can assure you tongue has not been on the list, but then our neighbor with a bison ranch called.

“We’ve been butchering this weekend, we did 2 bison and 2 cattle.  Is there any chance Pat would like some tongue?”

Being a good wife, I told the truth.  “Yes, he’d be head over heels.  He’s been talking about tongue for weeks!”

“Oh, then I’ll give him two tongues.  Would he like a tail?”

“Ah…yes, he’d probably love a tail”.

“Well, would he be interested in the heart?”  Which is where I drew the line and said very nicely, “No”, I mean “No, thank you”.

At church the next day, while some of us were trying to drink coffee and nibble on cookies, ‘they’ were talking about the tongue and how to make it, eat it, enjoy it, stopping only to move on to talking about tails and hearts and fat.  My Loving Spouse at this point expressed how much he’d love to have some cow fat (otherwise known as suet), but still, fat is fat.

“Oh, we’ve 5 gallons of it, we’ll drop some by”.  Which is why there is a very large bag of fat, I mean suet in our freezer, all cozy, right in there with the left-over Eggos, 2 tongues and the tail.  Oh, and some Elk.

The Teen and I are pretty proud of ourselves.  After all, we managed to keep our lunch down when the elk packet was gifted to My Loving Spouse and the hunter said, “Oh, there may still be some hair on it”.

Our Friend the Farmer called.  He had another animal for us, the 255 pound ‘runt’ of his pig litter.  “Go take a look at it”, he said, (which is what he always says) and we go look at it (which is what we always do), although ‘we’ didn’t all get out of the truck, just ‘some’ of us got out of the truck, ‘some’ of us could see it just fine.  Going to ‘look’ at pigs pretty much clinched the deal on NOT wanting to raise pigs.  Our Friend the Farmer keeps his pigs fairly far away and definitely down wind of his house.  We didn’t really even know which pig we were looking for and it didn’t really matter, as this pig had a price tag and a name and it was called “Christmas Dinner”and then some.

The litter was going on their one way field trip to see the Butcher.  My Loving Spouse informed me that I was to call the Butcher and tell him how we wanted the pig ‘done’.

“What do you mean, how we want him ‘done’?”  In little white packages ready for the freezer was how I wanted him ‘done’.

At this point My Loving Spouse wised up and talked to the Butcher himself, which falls under the category of ‘good move’.  255 pounds of pig turns into 165 pounds of white packages and we must co-ordinate with Our Friend the Farmer at the end of the week for the official pig pick up.  My Loving Spouse is very excited about ‘our’ pig and apparently some pig ‘parts’ which are hard to get.  Really?  This is probably for a reason, was what The Teen and I are thinking, that however is another story….

But for now…bacon anyone?

I have no words or understanding for the horrific events in Connecticut.

Our simple problems are gifts.  The Teen drove her car for the first time in the snow, sliding off the road and knocking over a cable box.  The 26-year-old car is a tank and so both the car and The Teen are fine.  She now drives even slower and found the other teens at school understanding and helpful.

Today we are the fortunate ones  and with the snow falling, I find spending time together in the wood pile a simple gift.  My Loving Spouse teaching The Teen to split wood.  It is declared a success as she manages to split a few pieces and not shed any blood or break any body parts.  The Teen informs us that although she can now swing an ax, it probably won’t be her first line of defense should the Zombie Apocalypse happen.

I am grateful to notice the simple gift of a winter’s day, and still our hearts ache.

Baby Jesus got lost in the move.  Well, not ‘lost’ exactly, just misplaced.  I wasn’t too worried, I remember seeing him in the packing and after all a lot of manger scenes don’t have him showing up until Christmas.  I figured we still had 12 days to find him.  This is however, my favorite manger scene, the one my kids made when they were little.  I also knew down deep that there might only be about one of my family members to notice him missing.  We could probably fudge it until he showed up, and that it might be Easter, which would be pretty poor theology.

I found Baby Jesus,

mostly because I was keeping my eyes open for him.

I have to say I am humbled by this ageless truth.

When I keep my eyes open for him, I find him in so many places of my life.

How many men does it take to get a stuck cow with three legs out of a ditch?  The first part of the problem was that the cow did not actually see herself as stuck.  After all there was grass to eat and a place to poop, so all her needs were met.  The good news is that our cow does not move very quickly, so there was time to figure out what to do.  The bad news is that our cow does not move very quickly so it is hard to get her to move from just about anywhere, let alone a ditch.

The answer is that it takes 3 men to get a 3 legged cow out of a ditch.  Luckily for us there were 2 men here working and one of them was Our Friend the Farmer’s Top Man, so he was already familiar with Elsie.  The Top Man took the tail and the other 2 men each grabbed an ear and sort of steered (no pun intended), dragged Elsie up and out of the ditch.  With everyone having a firm hold on their cow body part, she didn’t stand too much of a chance of staying in the ditch, which was good for me, as I was the next able-bodied cow mover and there were not any left over cow body parts I wanted to grab on to.

Perspective is everything!  I was emptying my junk email folder and before I do so, I usually peruse it quickly to make sure that it really is all junk.  I caught sight of an email that could be of great help here.  Mole removal!  Wow, I thought, I’m so glad someone knows how to get rid of the little varmints.

My elation was short-lived as I realized it wasn’t mole removal..

It was mole (mole, skin tags and freckles) removal… darn!