Merry two-days-after Christmas.

We had a very nice first Christmas in our "new" hundred-year-old house. Miss C and her parents drove up here for Christmas dinner, and then spent the night-- C in her room up in the Barn, and her parents in the Cottage. C loves the casual Texas decor of the Barn rooms, and she was happy to see all the cow and horse paintings I've found since her last visit here. She is planning to come up again sometime in January to spend a few days with us before her classes begin for the new term.

I roasted a turkey breast for Christmas dinner, and I swear I may never buy a whole turkey again. Everyone seems to like the white meat anyway, and I usually end up giving most of the dark meat to Gracie and the cats. Which isn't a bad thing for them, but it's a royal pain for me to be lifting a whole turkey in and out of the oven and then having to carve it into neat slices. As far as I'm concerned, a Butterball whole turkey breast is the way to go in this house. We had all the trimmings with the turkey, including my husband's oyster dressing, so it felt like a combination of Thanksgiving and Christmas. (Without ten pounds of leftover turkey.)

The weather didn't stay warm for the holiday... Christmas Eve and Day, and the day after, were just too cold to be comfortable outside. We all talked about past holidays, when it was Spring-like for Christmas Day and we all just loved it even though all of us grew up with northern winters. My cousin F in NY told me about the 26-inch blizzard of snow that came their way last week, and I truly have to say that if I never see snow again, that would be just fine with me. As it is, I've been dressing in layers since before Thanksgiving, and that is getting to be a royal pain as well.

I'm sure the stores are crowded now with shoppers looking for after-Christmas bargains. I don't want to see the inside of a store for at least a week-- whatever they're selling isn't worth the after-Christmas rush.

About the only thing I'd like to see is the inside of Mr. Watson's chicken farm....... I would really like to pick out another red hen, and maybe another black/white hen as well. C gave me a vintage copy of "The Little Red Hen" for Christmas, along with a whimsical polka-dotted red hen figurine for my kitchen. Cleaning the chicken coop every morning has been a chore lately-- it's a lot easier and quicker, with just three hens in there, but it's a chore because I know that there will be no fresh eggs in the nesting boxes. (I have long since given up on getting eggs from the two Guinea hens, and Audrey is really past her egg-laying days.) I have just six eggs left from Dolly, and I'm only using them for omelets or eggs-over-easy. I had bought a dozen eggs at WalMart to use for mixing into a recipe-- and as soon as you crack those eggs open, you can tell right away that it's not a "real" fresh egg. (How quickly we get spoiled.)

For my Christmas gift to my husband, I made him a special Christmas tree.... filled with old black/white photos of his growing-up years in NY. I found pictures of his parents, his grandfather, his sister, their house. We had a box of old photos that my husband hadn't looked through in years, and I picked out the photographs that I thought would mean the most to him. The tree looked beautiful, with fiber-optic lights tucked inbetween the branches, the photos cropped and decorated with holiday trimmings, little gold bells and red berries and tiny pine cones. The tips of the branches were lightly flocked so it looked like a northern Christmas tree sprinkled with snow. When my husband saw the tree and started looking at all the old photos, he had tears in his eyes. It was a very special Christmas keepsake gift, along the lines of the "It's a Wonderful Life" movie.

And indeed it is. A wonderful life.