Christmas Day

"Why can't we have beef?" Mike asked. True, with all the delicious Bunchgrass Beef in our freezer, we never seem to eat beef on Christmas. So this year, we shouldered aside the locally raised turkey, and hefted three roasts into the wood cookstove.

Sometimes I wonder about food being the center of our celebrations, especially with all the sweet, sticky, crunchy, iced, dipped, and sprinkled treats. Then I get a package of stollen in the mail from my sister who lives in a ghost town in the high desert, and I rip it open, eager to toast my first hunk, slather it in butter, and maybe even, oh Lord, dab on some of her quince jelly.

Food can be a gift of love. Such it was that we gathered with two other families on Christmas Day, to relish not only the three roasts, succulent and savory, but also an enormous brick of scalloped Prairie Creek Farm potatoes (took three hours to cook), green beans with shallots and red pepper, Grandma Lorry's hot-out-of the oven cloverleaf rolls, mounds of fresh greens with lemon juice/olive oil dressing, and raspberry-huckleberry topped cheesecake.

Rounded out by our other traditions of wild rope swings in the hay mow, brisk walks through the fields, non-stop music jamming in the living room and a relay of board and card games, it was a simply lovely Christmas. Sigh.