Over the holidays, this giant box arrived on our doorstep.  Mysteriously, we were then emailed to say, Don’t Open Until Christmas!  It was Uncle Mark and Uncle Jon and Cousin Wesley making these secretive requests.

So we did.  We waited.  It was hard.  Trying to guess what might be in this large box!  We moved it around in the studio a wee bit, considering it closely with each new home it got.

Finally, the big day arrived!  We could open the box!  

A new farm cart!  Yah!  What a lovely gift…  We had this little yellow one when we first moved in and it served very well until it’s untimely death about three years ago.  We just plum wore it out.

This one is bigger and more sturdy!  It’s the farm edition one!  Maggie and Evee set to work at once putting the thing together as our Christmas dinner cooked.  It was not too hard, just required taking it a step by a step.  Maggie is pretty good at these things and she actually does read the instructions!

Evee looks a little concerned.   Its not that she lacked faith in Maggie, but rather she was concerned as to how she would be able to jump around all the parts in the living room!  It has super nice big knobby tires and little fold down sides.  Fancy!

Another lovely feature is that the handle converts to a towable tongue!  So this spring when we get a riding mower, we can hook up the little wagon to it and use it all over the place!  Yahooo!

What?  You didn’t know we were getting a riding mower this spring?  Well, we are!  We must!  Our old Toro push lawnmower finally gave up the ghost.  After four years of hard hard labor, it finally just gave up the ghost.  It would not start after so much work.  It was in very sad shape.  I’m sorry to say, it was broken and beat down.  It had given it’s all.  It was just not a mower for several acres!  We plan to get a nice used one somewhere.  We could really use one all over the homestead for numerous things.  Like leaf pickup in the fall and raking in the spring all the fallen branches and such.   Maggie used it today to haul firewood out to the pit!  It’s very handy!

We have our trusty ice fishing sled for yucky cold snow and mud season, but this wagon will help out all the rest of the time, for sure.  Can’t wait to put it into service.  It was so nice of the guys to gift this lovely beast to us!   We love it.  Wesley saw the need when he was out visiting, and it was very sweet of him to think of us at the holidays in such a grand way!

We had a simple Christmas, and enjoyed some lovely ham and fresh mashed potatoes…  all the trimmings. Got our Grandma Mildred’s china and eat in style!  It was lovely and relaxing and very yummy!  Since we are trying to watch our diets very carefully, we opted to just make up a batch of fudge for the holidays… one chocolate mint half batch and the other peanut butter chocolate!   It was so easy and so good…  Just warm up a can of sweetened condensed milk in the microwave with a 12 ounce bag of whatever chips you like!  All chocolate, great!  We had gotten a few whacky chips over the holidays and gave it a whirl.  I think it turned out great.  The girls were not as impressed, but I did see that the chocolate peanut butter batch disappeared pretty fast!  Good thing my elves don’t really like mint in their chocolate much!  More for me to spread out a teeny bit at a time!

We didn’t do a lot of gifting this year and that was fine.  We probably will do a bit more next year, because we were a little disappointed that we let things slide.  We didn’t even put up our tree this year!  We thought that with three young kittens in the house, it would be chaos from the first minute.  We all voted and accepted this proposition.  However, in the end, it made for a rather simple and not quite right Christmas for us.   We did go and have a visit at the girl’s grandparents home up in Michigan.  That was very nice and good fun.  Maggie got a neat mini lathe for her Christmas gift and Jessy got to order some geeky fan girl stuff from a website she likes!  It was a win win situation, everyone was fine.

In the end, the house was tidy and quiet, all warm and snuggly.  I thought this picture just said comfortable and yes, it is.  Sure, there are things that really need to be done, but honestly, the place is finally settling and feeling great, like a house should.  It’s wonderful.  

Hope you had a merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and good wishes over all of the holidays in this end of the year!  It’s been a much better year, this last year, then 2014 before it…  I think we are heading for the right port!   Just gotta keep on, keeping on!   Thanks for droppping back and reading all these posts and such.  I hope we are sharing some sort of usual information!

Best wishes for a happy New Year!!!

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