A Merry Christmas to All...

-Posted by Isaac

The Great 2014 Honey House Fire has been cleaned up.
New wall, new window, new water lines, a coat rack, and in place of the stove, my old stump teaching podium.

Who runs water lines on the room-side of the wall?
A good plumber would drill holes in the wall studs then meticulously cut, place and glue the lines through the wall.
I'm not a good plumber. As it turns out, this prevented the honey house from going up it smoke.
A miracle, as Jayne stated-- yes.
This could also be called Slacker Serendipity.

So we're trying to have ourselves a merry December in spite of the fact that Christmas is quickly approaching. Jayne is busy beyond belief with Etsy orders and I'm mostly trying to stay out of the way.
One of the things I do this time of year is deliver "rent honey." We have 29 out yards (10 to 20 hives) on other people's land and this entitles them to honey or money, whether they want it or not.

About a third of the rent honey

For about a week I get to play the role of Santa Claus.

One small complication in the rent honey this year was the two bee yards in Holmes County. That's a long way to deliver!
Instead of a special trip, we took the whole family north for an Amish country Thanksgiving.

There, we had the pleasure of helping out with the harvest.

A little different than what we see in Pickaway County.

Grandpa said this wagon was done in record time.

Back home, it was time to find a Christmas tree.
Here's some more Slacker Serendipity. About ten years ago we planted a bunch of trees in a wet 10 acre corner of a bottomland field. The government paid for it... and continues to pay to keep it out of production. (Your tax dollars at work!)
Some of those trees happened to be evergreens. So for the last five or six years, Christmas has been taken care of.

"Can we hurry this up, Dad? It's cold!"

Is it legal to cut government sponsored trees?

We try not to ask these hard questions.

The same day the tree went up, we also managed a few Christmas lights.
And I do mean a few.
Thanks to a mismatch and strand malfunction, pictured below is our awesome light display outside the past several nights:

And  To All a Bah Humbug Night!