Christmas at the Cottage

For the first time ever, the girls and I spent Christmas up at our cottage.  Hailey headed out by herself on December 18th.  Helena and I headed out and joined her on the 19th.  Hailey decided to make herself a bunch of cocktails that evening, and it wasn't long before she had crashed on the sofa.

The next day, our contractor Scott was doing neighborhood snow removal and pushed up a big pile in the yard with his skid steer.  Helena promptly turned that into her snowman... "Lump".   Margarit and Annelise came out on December 22nd.  There was a lot of stuff to bring along as we had a tree, decorations, groceries for an extended stay, gifts, and all the pets.

Normally we have a big family Christmas with my Mom and my brothers and their families on Christmas Eve.  Traditionally this is followed by a second dinner at our place with Margarit's side of the family, on Christmas Day.  This year, as we were not allowed to gather due to Covid, we took advantage of the situation and headed out to the cottage.

We made our big turkey dinner with all the fixings on Christmas Eve.  The girls decided that they wanted to do the gift opening on Christmas morning.  Its funny that teenagers have trouble getting out of bed before noon... unless there is some incentive.  All three of the girls were up by around 7:30AM.  We had a small tree set up in our upstairs living room and had the gift opening around the tree.  Hailey had to head back to the city on the afternoon of Christmas Day, as she was scheduled to work on Boxing Day.

The rest of the girls stayed for a few days longer.  It had been very mild in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  When we first arrived at the cottage is was pretty brown and bare.  But the night before Margarit and Anna arrived we got a dump of about four inches of snow.  It made for a very pretty white Christmas.  On Boxing Day it cooled off even more and we had light snow all day long.

Mostly we were just lazy and took it easy.  We went for some walks around the subdivison, and kept the cottage nice and cozy with the wood stove.  We watched a few DVD movies, and I played guitar a little.  On the 27th I took my camera out in the yard and took a couple of photographs of the winter forest.  It was very quiet, and hardly any neighbors were around.  I found that rather surprising.  With the virus situation what it is, and everyone expected to isolate, I thought more families would have headed out to their cottages.  But, that was not the case.  We really enjoyed the peace and quiet.