A White Cabin Christmas... With Cats

Soooooo.... I am not going to offer any excuses for the lateness of this post, but I will apologise for taking so long to get around to it.  Sorry!

As most of you probably know, we spent Christmas at the cabin.  It was about the third or fourth white Christmas I've ever had, and I must say I approve of them.

We don't heat the cabin when we're away, and it can get a wee bit chilly.  When we first get there, the olive oil looks like this:

After about three hours of roaring fire, it looks like this:

And then, finally, after five or so hours, the oil is in its natural state and the cabin occupants have thawed out:

It's a good thing our guests on this trip brought their own fur!  Since we were going to be away for four days, we thought we'd try bringing Maggie and Dobie with us.  And much to our surprise, they did really well.

There was much exploratory sniffing to start with:

Maggie found the wood box absolutely fascinating,

while Dobie thought the upstairs was a bit of alright:

When they started patrolling the windowsills, I knew things were looking up:

I don't think they slept much the first night or two, but by the time Christmas day rolled around, all was definitely well:

There was some Christmas in there, too:

We cut the tree from the driveway.  I think it was bit young to be taken from its mother, but it looked just right.

We made these little guys from a kit years ago, and they were designed to wrap around candy canes.  The also work quite well with fire tools.

We had Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve, as we had to go back to Boise on the Tuesday so Daniel could go to work on Wednesday (I had the week off).  We had a lovely spinach, cranberry, hazelnut and pear salad with a mustard vinaigrette, a locally raised and smoked ham with mashed potato and broccoli, and bread pudding.

All in all, it was a lovely Christmas, with the added bonus of snow!

I discovered that time behaves quite differently when you don't allow yourself to be distracted by computers and phones and housework and such.  We may only have spent four days there, but it felt like much, much longer.  Lovely and relaxing.

We  also learned that when the cabin gets warm, it gets hot.  We slept with a window open at night, and once the place was well and truly warm, we let the fire go out at night, too.

Warm cabins also lead to slipping snow, it would seem (look carefully and you'll see what I mean)...

How much snow did we have?  About this much:

 

Daniel did some hiking while we were there (I stayed in because I was still getting over the flu and the sinus infection I got as a bonus with it it).  He took some lovely photos three or four k's from the cabin, which I think speak very eloquently for themselves:

Cheers!