Our first Christmas at Sweetlove Farm (written by Phil)
After 18 years of marriage and 16 years of raising kids, Sal and I just spent our first Christmas at home with just our little nuclear family. It was beautiful, delightful, peaceful, and full of magic for our little ones, especially Finley, who, at the ripe age of 6 is in the full swell of the Christmas mystery. Indeed she turned out to be at the center of a fun Christmas story. On Christmas Eve afternoon she lost her very first tooth, so there was some jostling that night as the Tooth Fairy and Santa elbowed each other to get their jobs done. Now Finley is pretty much the most excited person in the world about anything, and she was so keyed up about those two visits that she “woke” up (read: bleary-eyed, REM stupor) while the Tooth Fairy was in mid job, and so said Fairy had to temporarily abandon the mission. An hour or so later, at literally the very second Santa was finishing his job, up the stairs (from the basement bedroom) comes an only slightly less bleary-eyed Finley to report in panic that her tooth, in its little plastic, tooth-shaped case from the dentist, was no longer under her pillow and that there was nothing from the tooth-fairy left there. (Keep in mind that all this magic stuff is VERY real to her still.) In the middle of this report to an equally bleary-eyed-and-ready-to-hit-the-hay-for-a-long-winter’s-nap set of parents, she noticed that Santa had made his deliveries. She suddenly was no longer bleary-eyed, but awake in wide-eyed wonder. And needless to say she was NOT going to go back to sleep, but instead insisted she get her siblings up out of bed! This was at 12:45am. So much for the long winter’s nap. I think we all managed to tumble into bed at about 2:30am. Cattle, sheep, and chickens still need to be fed in the mornings, despite Santa visits. It was a very short night, but a delightful time was had by all. As we were all nodding off to sleep, Burke said it was the best Christmas of his whole life. Compensation, indeed.
