Christmas On Swamp River Ridge

When we heard from our daughter yesterday shortly before noon, she reported that Chainsaw Tommy had plowed halfway out their 4-mile long winter driveway to pleasantly find that the loggers who are working off the same road had come in and plowed the two miles in to their site. So between him and the loggers, the four miles was plowed and open.

The fourteen miles of the county road from the main road to their "driveway" had not been plowed yesterday but we decided to go for it anyway.

And wouldn't ya know it, before we left it started snowing here harder than we had seen it during the storm. Oh well, we wanted to have Christmas and Chicken Mama had been holding Christmas dinner for a day already. We had plenty of emergency gear in our truck and the temperature was staying in the mild 20s. So off we went.

There was one set of tire tracks which made our journey easier on the unplowed county road. Roy had the truck in 4-wheel high and we were able to go along steadily with no trouble.

This was taken on daughter and son-in-law's winter driveway. The scenery all the way was gorgeous. Everything was heavily coated with heavy, pristine white snow.

The view of their house upon our arrival. The snow stopped just about then, but yes indeed, they do have an accumulation of snow! Close to two feet of the stuff.

What a pretty tree they had. Cut from their woods and decorated beautifully.

We had a wonderful Christmas celebration. Lots of nice gifts . . . many of them homemade which are the very best!

Chicken Mama has been designing cabinets for her kitchen and was absolutely thrilled with this one for storing plates that Chainsaw Tommy surprised her with.

Daughter made a batch of root beer for Christmas and here I am nonchalantly pouring out a glassful and slopping foam (whadda head!) all over the counter.

Son-in-law has been doing so much snow removal and shoveling in the past couple of days that by 8 p.m. he was nodding off in a comfy chair. We took that as our signal to load up and head off for home. It was a bright, moonlit night and the scenery was almost more awesome than in the daylight.

When we got to the county road, it had been plowed (hooray!) so it was an easy fourteen miles to the main road. I thought for sure we were going to see a moose because there were tracks all over the road. It looked as if 50 or so of them had been traveling to a moose convention somewhere in the woods. But the trip produced no wildlife . . . and only three vehicles in the whole forty miles. Two regular cars and one police car.

It may have been a day late, but it was truly a lovely Christmas!