I love multi-day celebrations. Christmas does NOT come but once a year, but rather has 7 days in one year and another 5 the following year. We are sitting here, before the fire, drinking a wee bit of vodka and reveling in the 7th day of Christmas.

Not to get ahead of myself, we did start on the 25th with Day 1 festivities. Zeke enjoyed the calm before the storm.

We ate food. (The deviled eggs were special for Lilith, who eats but little).

Since Christmas Day 1 is a birthday party, we ate cake.

We drank wine. The elderberry has a festive color!

We opened presents.

We sat on laps.

We calmed down.

And then we said, “so long.”

On the Third Day of Christmas we went to a museum. The boys gifted us babysitting. Now I have pan envy.

We came home to hail, thunder and lightning.

On the Fourth Day we received the gift of 8” of snow and gale force winds.

On the Sixth Day we ventured out in search of sausage casings, having spent the Fifth Day moving snow.

Which brings us to today! We celebrated all that snow (it hasn’t stopped snowing for the past 3 days) by making sausages. Today we made 24 pounds of venison-pork Swedish potato sausage. We sampled some for dinner and it was worth the effort. We have bratwurst and kielbasa to go. Michael took the photos today as I wrestled the casings. Being thin and delicate (you rinse the salt off and run water through them to open them up, all of which takes nimble fingers), I get to coax the casings onto the stuffer and then tie them off. Snow in bowls keeps the meat cold during the grinding process. That is an open window, which turns the back bedroom into a refrigerator. Last year we didn’t have a sausage snow until February.

Happy New Year and here’s to five more days of Christmas!