Christmas flowers on my mom’s table
We got an early start, chores done, car loaded and on the road by 8:15AM. It’s a couple hours drive to CT. Halfway down I put my Christmas music on, the last day I can listen to it. There was little traffic on the roads at this hour.
We got there just after 10AM and my brother wasn’t back from feeding calves yet. I gave my mom her present and she loved the pretty powder blue sweatshirt with the chickadees and apple blossoms embroidered on it. She put it right on. She wears a lot of sweatshirts as their house is cold in winter.
I set about setting up for the brunch and my brother arrived a little later. He started thawing the sausage as he’d forgotten to. Then he started making the Finnish pancake. I got the table set and started putting condiments and appetizers on it.
Besides the pancake and sausage, there was our maple smoked bacon, cream cheese stuffed dates, and the deviled eggs I brought. We had coffee, water and milk to drink. Maple syrup and butter for the pancake, and my brother decided to thaw some cooked shrimp and I put out cocktail sauce. The were 2 types of stollen: marzipan and cherry, that someone had gifted them.
It was a nice meal, but mostly unplanned as to menu. The sausage was from the piglets we had visited last June. It was really delicious!
The pancake went into the oven and he was cooking the sausage by noon. We sat down shortly after and my middle brother showed up then. A while later his 2 sons, my nephews, arrived.
We ate and visited for a long while. Then I cleared the table and put food away while my brother did dishes.
We opened the presents and we able to figure out the Hadleyware plates I’d given were the newer style, as they have a second smaller circle on the bottom. They are also dinner plates and all these decades, my family has used the 8” luncheon plates. I must remember this!
When washing up, my brother discovered a crack in the large platter. So I must keep an eye out for one of those.
My middle brother and sons had a wood chipper to repair for a friend at 2 PM and we had to leave around then also. The hens need to be closed up by dusk, with the fox family around.
The ride home was ok, good deal more traffic, but not too bad. We’d lit both stoves before we left and the house was still warm when we got home. Our poor old cat had been sick, so my first job was to clean that mess up. But she seemed fine once she woke up, so that ended ok.
It was nice to spend time with some of the family. It will probably be a long time before we get down again, perhaps Mother’s Day.