December 26 2008: Home for Christmas
While this is the time of year when many people head 'home' for Christmas festivities, our friend, George in Canada, was home for Christmas too. George passed away on Christmas Eve - and being a man of faith, it seems fitting that he made it home in time for Christmas. As we noted in our blog from last week, George supervised Kelvin's Masters and PhD degrees, and afterwards they co-authored academic papers, wrote books, team taught university classes, and jointly conducted professional development sessions for many teachers. They even lived together at one point! But more than all of that, George became a good friend and part of our family. We will miss this softly spoken, intelligent and gentle man but we will forever remember his smile as he sat in the middle of a 40 acre field watching our dogs teaching us how to bring in the sheep, amongst other good memories.

George with Hetty, a dear friend and fellow Colleague of Kelvin and George.

Christmas Day we spent mostly with the dogs! When we lived in Canada, we sometimes had a 'waifs and strays' party - a party for all those people, mostly students, who were away from their home country (and could not go 'home'). We enjoyed some of those parties! This year with the weather being good (amazingly), we managed to finally get some photos of our youngest pups, and we took all of the others for a long walk in the nearby forest. Despite it being a bit brisk, we thoroughly enjoyed the solitude of the forest. Just us and 8 dogs.

We did have a wee turkey dinner compliments of the Brynberllan turkeys. We were going to write about feathering the turkey but instead we decided to show you the sombre occasion.

...for the turkeys, that is. There is a great tradition surrounding feathering the turkeys but like salting the pigs, we can't share the details. Except, we can say that sipping mulled wine at the end of the evening is mandatory...or, if someone drops the mulled wine (we won't mention names, Mike), sherry is the order of the day. We can tell you that the turkeys were shared far and wide, and were excellent. We will never buy a turkey from a supermarket ever again.

We have to tell you something about Santa coming to Wales ...and this was told to us by Mike and Nora's grandkids. In preparation for Santa's reindeer, it is a must to put some silage on the front doorstep of the house. Of course, the reindeer will be hungry and in need of sustenance. While in the cities kids must leave carrots for the reindeer, in rural communities, silage is the order of the day. Imagine how sick of carrots Rudolph would be by the time he got to the farms? Funny how Santa doesn't seem to tire of Whisky. Imagine the delight of these kids when they got up the next day and checked the front of the house. The silage was gone, but the reindeer did leave some poop behind.

Santa seems to have dragged Byrnberllan into the digital age! Mike and Nora are now the proud owners of a digital camera and a digital photo frame...and the amazing thing is that it has only taken 24 hours for them to figure out how to use all of this technology. Perhaps we can get them on a computer yet.

Back to work for us tomorrow.