{"id":561,"date":"2014-12-27T07:59:35","date_gmt":"2014-12-27T07:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/franchlife.com\/?p=561"},"modified":"2014-12-29T19:57:56","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T19:57:56","slug":"reflections-on-christmas-on-the-franch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/?p=561","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Christmas on the Franch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christmas on the franch isn\u2019t anything like the paintings in the Norman Rockwell Christmas collection. \u00a0Our life is actually pretty much the opposite of his artwork. \u00a0But, the imperfections of our day lead to good laughs and memories. \u00a0It\u2019d be interesting to see how an artist would paint our Christmas on the franch. \u00a0The first piece of work portraying our day\u00a0would be of our children pulling on overalls over their pajamas. \u00a0In the background, there’d be unopened presents still under the Christmas tree. \u00a0It’s expected that morning chores be completed first even on Christmas day. \u00a0Excitedly, our\u00a0children go about their barn responsibilities as they guess the contents of the\u00a0wrapped boxes of different shapes and sizes. \u00a0The artist would later have to paint our children opening their gifts with hay on their pajamas from filling up the feeding troughs, wet sleeves from cleaning out the chicken waterers, and dirt under their fingernails from a quick barn sweep. \u00a0In an\u00a0art gallery exhibit of Christmas on the franch, you’d see\u00a0watercolors\u00a0of unusual gifts unwrapped on Christmas morning. \u00a0One year, my husband decided it wasn\u2019t right for his lady to sit on an overturned bucket while milking the goats. \u00a0So, my special gift was a homemade milking stool. \u00a0Needless to say, my husband isn’t gifted in the craft of woodworking so his plans of a stable three-legged stool didn\u2019t quite work out. \u00a0But, that\u00a0wobbly, lopsided four-legged stool remains one of my favorite gifts ever and is proudly on display in my dining room. \u00a0(And, by the way, I still sit on an overturned bucket to milk our goats). \u00a0Another\u00a0gift likely only a francher would be grateful to open\u00a0on Christmas morning is an automatic water bucket. \u00a0A painting of me beside a Christmas tree with a genuine smile and sparkling eyes holding an automatic waterer could very well be hanging on the wall of a gallery someday. \u00a0Anything automatic on the franch is time saved\u00a0for a busy franch girl. \u00a0Painting our Christmas stockings hung over the\u00a0fireplace would frustrate any\u00a0artist because their work\u00a0would never be finished. \u00a0You see, our children\u00a0insist on\u00a0a stocking for\u00a0their\u00a0animals.\u00a0 And, the animals are always changing on our franch. \u00a0My poor mother gets requests for her hand-sewn stockings almost every year as new animals arrive either through a sale or birth. \u00a0Then, there are the stockings that stay in the Christmas storage bin out in the shed the next year\u00a0(like the one for the dog that wouldn\u2019t stop eating our chickens, and the one for the calf that was sold, and then there’s the\u00a0one for the lamb butchered earlier in the\u00a0year\u2026). \u00a0Unexpectedly, there was\u00a0one brief moment\u00a0during this year\u2019s Christmas celebration that our family felt like\u00a0Norman Rockwell\u2019s\u00a0The Thanksgiving Picture<\/em>. \u00a0Except it wasn’t\u00a0roasted turkey. \u00a0Instead, even better, we\u00a0served fresh roast leg of lamb with rosemary. \u00a0It was a\u00a0lamb born and raised on our franch. \u00a0And, each\u00a0of the main ingredients of the side dishes was fresh from our winter garden. \u00a0On the table with the lamb was creamed cabbage, sweet-n-sour beets with apples, broccoli sunshine salad, mashed potatoes, and fresh pumpkin pie from one half-green, half-orange pumpkin that had barely made it through an early frost and had surprisingly ripened off the vine in our barn. \u00a0We all marveled that what was before us on the table was grown with our own hands. \u00a0Though I must admit that something about our meal wasn’t\u00a0perfect. \u00a0We had planned such an extensive menu that it\u00a0was\u00a0served four hours later than promised. \u00a0So, by the time we were gathered at the table, our children were already full from eating candy canes and chocolate stocking stuffers all day. \u00a0Our\u00a0family definitely doesn\u2019t live up to the perfect standards of a Rockwell painting at Christmas or any time of the year, but what family does?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christmas on the franch isn\u2019t anything like the paintings in the Norman Rockwell Christmas collection. \u00a0Our life is actually pretty much the opposite of his artwork. \u00a0But, the imperfections of our day lead to good laughs and memories. \u00a0It\u2019d be interesting to see how an artist would paint our Christmas on the franch. \u00a0The first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=561"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":596,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions\/596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}