Slowly but surely, I’m getting my house all decked out for Christmas. My tree has been up since the day after Thanksgiving. Alexa knows exactly what carols to play to make me smile.
My mama’s favorite cat figurine, the one she loved to decorate for each holiday, is on the top of the Hoosier cabinet. He’s wearing his Santa hat, he has a wreath around his neck, and there’s a silver bell adorning the tip of his tail.
Here on Riverneck, I have Christmas. I’m not absolutely finished decorating, but I’m happy. I look around me, and I see the beautiful pieces My Boy and I have accumulated through the years, and I know I am home.
But at the farm, I don’t decorate too much.
We don’t live there, so I don’t have a tree.
There is more silence there than music.
There, we sit on the porch and listen to the wind rattle dry leaves around the roots of the sycamore. There are a few leaves still on the tree, but fewer and fewer of them every day.
The winds that swirl ’round have so mixed the pecan and sycamore and walnut and chestnut and oak leaves until it’s hard to tell which leaf came from which tree. But they do make a satisfying crunch when I walk from the feed barn to the chicken pens.
We sit on the porch and listen to the sound of Roscoe and Sugar behind us, stamping in the shelter, chewing grain.
We sit and listen to the sound of crows and owls when evening falls around us.
I suppose it isn’t silence, not exactly, but my soul and my spirit are soothed in the quiet of this farm.
I do have one nod to the Christmas season here at the farm with me.
My Tami, who knows me so well, gave me a simple metal silhouette to keep close by the steps of our cabin. I can see it from my chair on the porch.
It has no lights.
It plays no music.
The outline of it suggests a stable, suggests the young mother, Mary, and her Joseph. Between them, a manger and a baby.
I think that’s all I want there with me on the farm right now.
I try to remember that the very first Christmas Day, whenever it was, was simple.
It was sweet.
It was a man and a woman. A boy baby and it was a mystery, and it was sacred.
Here, tonight on this farm, that seems enough.
Somehow, it’s exactly enough.
Blessings,
Vickie
** used by permission from Vickie’s Facebook page – Photo credits – Vickie Woolard