December 3, 2022

If you’ve been with us for a while – or have read past blogs, you know that we were quite depressed and stressed last holiday season. We were still living in the loft over the garage and working on renovating the farmhouse. Our blog is called “Undaunted Farming” because we were able to handle the many hurdles that were thrust upon us. Last holiday season was just too much, and we felt the weight of EVERYTHING. While we ate Thanksgiving dinner in our house with John’s parents last year, it was as if we were camping, and it was hard to have a thankful attitude. We worked all through December and the Christmas holidays and did not take any time to enjoy the season. It was awful and we pledged to make the 2022 holidays better.

Well, we are making it better! We hosted Thanksgiving in the house this year. Both sets of parents were able to join us, as did two of our sons and our daughter-in-law. Joshua spent Thanksgiving weekend with his best friends from college at one of their homes.

In true Katie fashion, she wrote out the menu for the 5 days of Thanksgiving, beginning on Wednesday, and set out to prepare much of the food ahead of time. She made and froze Guinness Beef Stew, Sour Cream Beef Enchiladas, Turkey Casserole, Mashed Potatoes, Quiche, desserts, desserts, and more desserts. Every night had her working on 2 or 3 more dishes. What we discovered was that all the time and effort we went through engineering our kitchen and mudroom paid off. Everything was easily accessible, and it made cooking and baking a dream!

When we processed our home-grown, pasture-raised turkeys in early September, we saved two whole turkeys for us – the rest we pieced out, sold, or gave away. The two whole turkeys were 30 lbs each! Joshua took one of them to his friend’s house for their Thanksgiving celebration and we cooked the other one. We were a little worried because we’d never roasted a turkey that was not from the grocery store. Commercial turkeys are pumped full of saline (and who knows what else) to make them tender and moist. After spending a day in a brine, we filled the cavity of our turkey with aromatic vegetables and herbs, spread seasoned butter under the skin and covered the breast with bacon! It looked so beautiful as it roasted it in the oven. We were not disappointed! The meat was very flavorful, juicy, and tender. Yum! We will raise our own turkey again next year!

By Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, all our guests had left. It was such a peaceful day. We were filled with gratitude that we could celebrate Thanksgiving this year, for our home, and especially for our family. The stresses of the holiday season of 2021 were gone. Thanks be to God!

Our family celebrates Advent – the 4 weeks that precede Christmas. Advent began that Sunday after Thanksgiving, so we methodically took down our fall decorations and started putting up the Advent and Christmas decorations. There are a few different schools of thought regarding Christmas decorations. Some only decorate for Advent and save the Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve. Others put it all up early. We choose to put it all up because the weeks leading up to Christmas can bring their own stresses from outside influences – events at church, plays and concerts with kids, gift shopping, wrapping, visiting, etc. Decorating, itself, can be stressful, so we like to do that early and then enjoy the rest of the season.

We had fun decorating, we did a little at a time. We even got our chicken display into the holiday season!!

We are decorating the outside, too! We have a huge front yard and since we are on a busy street, we want to bring joy to our neighbors. In addition to lights on the house, we made and painted pallet Christmas trees. This was a fun activity and we worked together to make them. We plan to add to our outside decorations each year. We might even sell some of these decorations in the future. This year, we are going to make most of our Christmas gifts. We are not going to tell what we’re making (our family reads this blog, right?). Both of us enjoy making things and we use that time to reflect on each individual person who will receive the gift instead of running from store to store buying things the receiver may or may not need.