Christmas 2012

I can sum up my excuse for tardy posts with one picture...

Honestly, I don't know how I ever got things done on the homestead when I had 4 kids running around!  Of course I was a lot younger then.  Hmmm.  This 20 month old little blessing has kept me quite busy over the last couple of weeks, with little time to post!

When I haven't been busy chasing him, I was working on preparing our annual Christmas gift baskets.  This year we chose a breakfast theme.

Before I get started, I want to pause and show you a gift I recieved.  It's an 8 foot long stainless steel commercial kitchen work table....

A friend found it at a garage sale, and immediately thought of me!  It took some scrubbing and polishing, but now it is a sanitary, convenient workspace for me!!

I spent hours working at that table getting bacon sliced.  Our bacon was especially good this year...

Then I moved on to mix the breakfast sausage, and getting the rest of the things for the basket in order...

There just wasn't time to take pictures of each step, from grinding the flour to drying apricots and toasting nuts.  Except for the coffee and little creamers all was home made/mixed/ground or grown.

This year the baskets included:

a dozen eggs

breakfast sausage

bacon

spiced apple pancake mix

beauty berry syrup

beef jerky

apricot coconut almond trail mix

toasted hazelnut coffee

raisin oat nut granola

They all turned out very nice, and it brings us joy to share the fruits of our labor with the ones that we love.

On Christmas day we all gathered at Bob's folks' house.  We are very blessed to still have his mom and dad with us, as well as his brother and 2 sisters and their families.  All of us live close enough that we are able to get together every year.

Of course there is always good food, good conversation, and lots of memories.

Here is Bob with his parents and siblings...

And here are the GrandQueens

Once the food was eaten, babies were tired, conversations were dwindling.....it was time once again to go our separate ways.  As we were getting ready to leave and saying our good-byes....we got this...

Yep!  Our first snow of the new winter!  Big chunky storybook flakes of Christmas snow!

On the one day of the year that I actually welcome that white stuff!

I hope each and every one of you had the Merriest of Christmases, and I pray for peace and blessings to each of your households in the coming year!

Merry Christmas from all of us at Queenacres!