December 2021: The Final Shades of the Year

December was quiet in my garden. I moved around a few more leaves but that was about all I did all month. All the plants pretty well finished settling back into the earth for the winter. Slowly the last pops of vibrant color drained away. At first glance, the photos of my garden from the start and end of the month look the same, but on further examination you might be surprised at the things that were left to fall away as the month progressed. The blackberries were the last plants to have their leaves turn color and drop. I love their colors darkening from yellows into reds and purples.

We did some good cooking in December (though we cook well every month!). Early in the month we made acorn squash stuffed with Beyond Burger, veggies, and breadcrumbs. The squashes were not from my garden, but they were local. They tasted amazing and 100% like they contained actual meat. We don’t normally cook with Beyond Burger, but we had some on hand and this was a great way to use it.

On Christmas Eve we made Smoking Bishop, a British mulled wine drink mentioned at the end of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. One of the most interesting parts of the recipe was that you roasted citrus fruits in the oven before putting them along with some other spices into some port and heating the whole thing up. It was tasty! Apparently it’s called Smoking Bishop because it’s the color of bishops’ robes and the steam rising off of it looks a little like smoke. (I was inspired to try making it after watching this video.)

I didn’t include a photo, but we did cook up some of my garden produce, too. Our Christmas meal included some of my sweet potatoes roasted.

And I decorated for Christmas! It always looks cheery. I hate to take the outdoor lights down in January knowing we’ll have a few more dreary months to go. I’ve had solar lights on my bottle tree/stump all year, and I thought I’d leave them up for Christmas, but then I saw a photo of the tree last year with real Christmas lights on it. The non-solar lights were so much brighter and really made the bottles sparkle, so I decided I needed to switch out the solar lights for some higher-powered ones for Christmas. I was not disappointed.

And finally, you’ll notice we have a more conventional Christmas tree this year. John and I normally go to a secret spot on strip mine land and grab a cedar. People from Patchwork have been getting their trees that way (though usually with official permits) for nearly a half century (yikes!), but this year when John and I arrived at the spot we knew it wasn’t going to work. It was like the gates leading to Brigadoon had disappeared. There was no route to the clearing where we’ve found our trees over the last many years, despite multiple passes down the road where we knew it should be. And it looked like things were being actively mined again. Without a permit, it felt like a really bad idea to stop, so we didn’t.

We ended up getting a nice tree from a local tree farm. The tree farm’s trees weren’t big enough to cut yet, but they’d gotten several pre-cut trees from a big tree farm in Northern Indiana. I felt a little like one of the people in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special who choose the fancy trees instead of the scraggly little one. The one we got has even been dyed a little bit to ensure a nice, green appearance. Oh well. It was the right choice this year.