Well, not really.  It's about family, and celebration, and being with the ones you love in the deep, dark days of winter (hah!  In the 70's and sunny here on Christmas Day!).  But, for a family as food-oriented as ours, it's also All About The Food. 

This year, there was a little bit of a changing of the guard in the cooking department.  Instead of me being the Major Chef, the duties and pleasures were spread around a little. 

Starting with Christmas Eve Dinner.  Our son being home for the holidays from New York City, where he currently resides, offered to fix Christmas Eve Dinner for us.  He and his father went off a-hunting to the new Whole Foods Market down on Sixth Street in Austin, where he'd not had the opportunity to go on previous visits.   Hours later they returned, laden with the fruits of their labors, and DS set to work. 

After m ...

We got ice.  All the fence lines, barbed and no-climb, are coated in a quarter inch of ice.  Wrecks all over the place.  IH35 (the major highway from Mexico to Canada) is closed from Jarrell to Salado (which means, my neck of the woods, just two miles away if I could get there), due to the unique slant of the highway there that makes semis go sliding back down the slope if they should make it even partway up.  (We - the town, small enough not to even have a flashing yellow -  put up 400+ people due to that a few years back, the highway being closed from here to Waco, some 73 miles, that year.)

Windchill of 9.  I'm out here by myself because my husband had the good sense to camp out at work last night rather than become a statistic by getting stuck or wrecked somewhere trying to get home.

I went out to feed, and Lydia, who lived in Vermont for her first six years and for whom, consequently, this is a ...