The Holiday Season Commences!

No matter how hard we try to deny it, the "holiday season" in this country seems to begin at Thanksgiving Day and proceeds through into the New Year.  I have no issue with this.  I have no issues with fabric and craft stores offering their holiday materials starting in July.  I make something for each and every one of my loved ones every year, so I know that you can't plan on shopping 2 days before Christmas if you plan on crafting or sewing several projects.  I do, however, have a mental seize-up hearing all the holiday crap as early as September or October.  I know it isn't patriotic to despise the blatant pleas for us to rush out in the middle of the night to spend money so THEY are in the black for the year.  Not one of  THEM is all that concerned about the state of my finances and how much red is showing in my quiet little world.

Cliché Thanksgiving Day gatherings tend to involve massive quantities of wonderful food and hordes of family and friends attending to the dispatch of these comforting goodies.  Reality, however, compels many of us to have to be on hand to work on the following day (see above) so that these folks are unable to travel any distance at all to be a part of the celebration.  Distance of the sort that involves double digit hours of driving makes gathering together even more difficult.  Another challenge involves spending 'quality time' with all the branches and twigs on your family shrub, if at all possible.  Adulthood and blending families make this a common problem.

My incredibly clever and inventive nephew, Kelly, and his equally industrious wife, Kara, have come up with a very workable solution to that last challenge.  They have named it the "All-Family Thanksgiving Dinner" and each of the four years it has been in existence has made us realize what a wonderful idea it is!  The concept was based on the fact that it was not very enjoyable to try to plan which course of the meal to eat with whom and how long you could expect the next group you were going to see to tolerate your tardiness....again.  We all KNOW about 'those' people. You know the ones.  We mutter about them as we do the dishes as they are in the process of dirtying more!  Their solution was to include (yup, you got it) ALL the families, in-laws, outlaws, friends...anyone that we know may be spending the holiday alone or far from their own families  I know it sounds simple, but most of us don't really do it.

Tradition tells us that the first "Thanksgiving" dinner involved everyone in the village, as well as the native tribes from the surrounding area.  What Kelly and Kara planned wasn't far from that.  They reserved the Knights of Columbus Hall in Watertown. They invited all 'sides' of everyone's families to be a part.  They asked each of us to contribute names and addresses of our own family members and sent out lovely flyers telling where, when and what to bring.  They simply wanted an RSVP so they knew how much food to cook.  That isn't much to ask!

Kelly and Kara fix the turkey and the ham in those lovely electric roasters. It is all carved and ready to eat when we get there. Kara's mom actually makes REAL gravy from the drippings!  (There really ought to be some law against fake gravy from packets...there are laws about everything else!)  For the last 3 years, we have contributed potatoes from our garden, though I still am not pleased with the texture when they have to sit for very long.  With all the wonderful contributions, there are salads, veggies (both cold and hot), and desserts to choose from.  No one should go away hungry! Last year, someone brought a bag of potato chips.  Checking back later, we became aware that no one knew who that person was! After a little consideration, we realized that it really didn't matter if any of us knew him; what mattered was that he wasn't spending this particular Thanksgiving alone! We talked about having name tags, but realized that we would not only want to know the person's name but also who he or she "belongs to" and that that would sometimes involve a very large tag!

After the dinner has been consumed, folks join in to help clean up and then we seem to be forming a tradition of playing bingo....after all, the bingo cards are already there, right??  Again Kelly and Kara are so very organized that they have an assortment of prizes, tagged for either adults or kids, ready and waiting for each winner to choose from.

As we prepared to eat dinner, we looked around at the group (it has grown from about 45 the first year to almost 70 this year) and realized that many of the folks there were people we had actually met at the first gathering...and hadn't seen anywhere other than at Thanksgiving.  We also realized that it was very good to see them again! I have no way of adequately thanking my clever nephew and his wife for the wonderful idea they had....except to hope that they keep on planning this wonderful event.

It's a four letter word!

Last year we had our first snow on October 27th! It arrived with a bang, high winds took out our chimney and it snowed all day. So far the snow has stayed to the north of us, in fact, the grass is still green, even though we have had only a half inch of rain since September. An Indian Summer was much appreciated but low temperatures have been creeping up on us at night. Crystal clear, cold nights make for good sleeping and allowed us to enjoy the brilliance of Jupiter in close proximity to the moon. After living in large cities, the night sky is something I can never take for granted and, here on the northern prairies, we have a great deal of sky! Spectacular sunrises, breathtaking sunsets, a nightime sky crowded with stars, awe inspiring storms, winter-time sundogs; the sky dominates the Great Plains and I can understand that the vast openess intimidated some of the early settlers. Winter brings its own bleak, dangerous beauty to this area. Life slows down, even a busy agenda can not hurry us through the day, snow and ice determine the pace of life.

It is coming, you can feel it in the air. The goats have started getting their winter coat and the horses will soon be following. The horse tank in the pasture is frozen each morning, the waterer in the chicken house is plugged in and the heating element keeps the water liquid. This week we inserted an electric light bulb in the base of the automatic waterer in the barn. The heat from the light bulb keeps the pipe from freezing. Sheep, horses, chickens, unlike cattle, will all eat snow but while the ground is dry and frozen we need to be sure they still have access to water.

Time to store summer clothes and bring out insulated bibs and coats; hats and gloves are ready by the door with reserves in the pickup. The geese have been arriving from the north and, as our lakes and sloughs begin to freeze their days in this area are numbered. When they have no more water they will move further south. They don't seem as noisy this year but perhaps they still haven't reached their full numbers yet. Pheasant season started and deer season in this area starts on Saturday.

The last remaining crop to be harvested in our garden is Brussels sprouts, we have been waiting for a good freeze and they are now ready to harvest.....or they were! Yesterday I found the new goat, Hyacinth standing next to the plants, munching away, obviously enjoying her latest find. Somehow she had slipped through the electric fence, jumped the fence round the garden and made herself at home. Mercifully she did leave some for us! This was our first year at successfully growing Brussels sprouts, it seems Hyacinth approved. That will teach us to raise animals smarter than we are. Speaking of which, next year we plan on adding pigs to the mixture; I am so looking forward to that.

Our first snow has been promised for Saturday, 2-6 inches. It has arrived earlier in years gone by, but whenever it arrives, it is a four letter word.

Seasonal foods

Very few people think of eggs as being a seasonal food. Our chickens range freely in the pasture, digging and scratching, though at dusk they all march back into the brooder house, so we can lock the door on predators. In the brooder house they have corn available to them to encourage those beautiful yellow yolks. Yet as winter approaches we have an increasing number of days when the chickens stay in the brooder house. We have introduced a new generation of chickens into the flock, and the youngsters are less 'street smart' so, with harsher conditions, we tend to keep them locked up. The water is heated to keep it liquid but from the moment the chickens stop ranging they lay fewer eggs. When the days get noticeably shorter they lay even fewer eggs. We have gone from 15-18 eggs a day to one or two. Still plenty for our own use but not enough to hand out anymore. Strange, we had flyers out all summer advertising free range eggs, and now the phone calls have started!


The single most political act most of us can do is to eat locally grown food! A new study published in the journal Food Policy  found that the transportation of food over long distances (above 12 miles!) can cause more harm than the growing of food with non-organic methods.Calculating the hidden costs of food transport in farming, the researchers calculated that the UK could save around $4billion a year if all food consumed were to be grown locally and an additional $2 billion if it were grown organically. It may be time to label food in supermarkets with the miles a food has travelled.


Locally grown doesn't have to be boring, with all the techniques available for preserving food, it doesn't even have to be seasonal. We freeze, we dehydrate and we can food. We have 3 chest freezers and when we walk out to grab food, we jokingly refer to the south porch as 'Walmart'! We also try to share our bounty with family or friends unable to grow a garden. We try to grow as responsibly as possible and eschew chemical pesticides, preferring to use natural methods.

People may joke about the 'hippy lifestyle' or 'The Good Life' but eating locally grown food, growing it or buying from the Farmers' Market, affects farms, large corporations, political decisions..... I guess that makes us the revolutionaries of the 21st Century!