Shannon Hayes

On our farm, the holiday season started every August when the Swiss Colony Christmas catalogue arrived. I’d slip out to the lawn swing, prop the glossy pages on my knees and dream away summer by fantasizing about Dobosh tortes, sausages and cheese logs. As the holiday season stretched through fall, my catalogue fantasies expanded to include Christmas trees accessorized by husbands in silk robes with offerings of cashmere and diamonds; which, by the turn of the next page, brought in the flannel-clad, never-quarrelsome children decorating cookies on farmhouse tables. Those same children grew ecstatic when they discovered brightly packaged toys as they played beside the fire and sipped cocoa. Christmas catalogues didn’t suggest gifts. They offered a blueprint for my life.

Naturally, I was always shattered by noon on December 25th. My brother was querulous. The Dobosh torte was dry. The toys didn’t make me happier.

Catalogues chased me into adulthood, causing costly, and equally anticlimactic holidays. Finally, my husband and I could no longer atone for our contribution to America’s extra 6 million tons of trash that are generated each holiday season. So we stopped exchanging gifts. But those catalogues kept coming. With the birth of our children, they multiplied, arrived daily, and cajoled us for 5 months each year that our non-compliant family couldn't possibly know the true joys of Christmas.

Humbug. By October 1st this year, the pile was two feet high. I was tired of having my December desires defined for me. I didn’t need a reminder that I could be better dressed, that my tree would look more tactful with Victorian reproduction ornaments from China, or that I could make miracles happen for my girls with a new vintage wooden rocking horse. I called each company assaulting my mailbox and removed our address from their mailing lists.

The gift my family now offers to each other is time. Hence, our house is littered with paper snips as we cut snowflakes that look like alien paper dolls. The counters are covered with a series of attempted salt clay snowmen. We have a stack of holiday books from the library, and my scrap paper is adorned with crayoned angels. We still hope for Christmas miracles. Maybe the baby won’t poop two minutes after I squeeze her into a pair of tights. Maybe my four-year-old will show up at dinner wearing underpants.

Regardless, we celebrate. There is wine at dinner, Scotch after. Holiday music plays non-stop, the fires stay lit. These are the Persephone months, when the darkness is here, signifying the growing season is over. The laying hens are snuggled in the barn, the meat is harvested. A crock of sauerkraut sits in the basement, flanked by bushels of root vegetables. There are tubs of lard and tallow, and jars of apple butter, jam, pickles, beets, beans, peaches, pears, plums and cherries. The harvest is finally in. We’ve worked hard, and now we can feast, make merry, and best of all, cuddle down for a well-earned winter’s rest, not available through catalogues. Merry Christmas.

Shannon Hayes is the author of The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. Her essays on food, farming and sustainable living can be found at www.shannonhayes.info.