Welcoming winter

Happy Solstice everyone! Last night as you know we celebrated our first winter solstice. Our solstice time was 10:30 pm to be exact.  We spent much of the day preparing by going outside.  At ten in the morning our shadows looked like this, long and dark.

Because the weather was so nice I decided it was time to take care of the dead summer garden and pull everything out.

Here is the new winter growth. We've got beets, heirloom lettuce and an array of carrots.

At 3pm our shadows looks like this. The same as they did at 10 am. Only they were going in a different direction.

Then after a full day of thinking about and soaking up the sun light we went inside to prepare our first solstice feast. I invited our friends over to enjoy this with us, for what is a holiday without friends.

I made pumpkin soup with sage and nutmeg, cranberry sauce, roasted rosemary potatoes and lamb. My friend brought over a lovely crusty loaf of bread and the most beautiful salad with pomegranate seeds and walnuts. I really wish I had taken a photo of the salad; it was truly beautiful!

We finished it off with a Buche Noel.  I included a picture taken during the day so you could see the whole thing!

Once dinner was done we lit the Yule "log" and turned on the tree lights. By that time it was 6:15 or so and our little ones needed to sleep. So we said our goodbyes. After the girls were asleep Daniele and I sat on the couch and watched the candles burn. I think next year we will get the chimney cleaned so we can have a true fire.

This morning we woke to a cloudy sky. It took the sun so long to rise that I thought, if I were living a thousand years ago before they new how the planets moved around the sun, I might truly be worried that the sun wouldn't come back.  But it did. This was all I got of our sunrise. It was lovely, until the girls woke up and chaos began again.

I made soaked pancakes with blackberry syrup. I wanted to make them sun shaped to do a little play on dark versus light but I'm not a very good pancake artist, so I stuck to odd circles and ovals...  Overall we had a lovely celebration and I look forward to expanding it and making it part of our yearly tradition.