Christmas comes with a lot of pressure.

It’s like Bucky, a character in one of the Homestead’s must-watch Christmas movies (which got horrific and, in some aspects, totally deserved reviews but it still makes the list), Love the Coopers says:

Christmas comes around, somebody yells, “Time for comfort and joy, it’s Christmas.”

Everybody panics as if you can schedule happiness.

This year, ours started a little different than we had planned. We can still supply the obligatory photos:

and we still had a fun day. We ate a lot of the kind of food we don’t have everyday, opened gifts, laughed lots, told stories of Christmases past, and speculated on “this time next year…”

Shirley got to have her first ever walk in public as she has now had all the obligatory vaccinations

and there might have been a little afternoon snoozing as well.

What we didn’t plan for was our hay being baled at dusk on Christmas Eve or that the weather forecast would be quite so grizzly. Rain, it said, from 2pm Christmas Day.

All 80 odd bales were under cover in the barn by 9am Christmas morning after an early start that did not involve Christmas stockings.

Then it was into the Christmas duds and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

And rain it did. On Boxing Day it absolutely poured and we lounged around inside, basking in the warm glow of folk who have next year’s feed all tucked away and with only our cooked-spaghetti arms moaning about what Christmas is meant to be.

We hope you all had a lovely Christmas Day. Maybe yours went without a hitch, maybe it wasn’t quite what you wanted, whatever… Alan Arkin’s character in that kinda flawed but still fun Christmas movie spoke clever words; you can’t schedule happiness. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, make hay while the sun shines, then roll up your sleeves because some jobs can’t wait and, in it all, find your joy.

Love to you all from our home to yours; see you next year.