Christmas was such a blessed season for our family.  We continue to celebrate the holy season with our Jesse Tree devotions & decorations as one part.  It becomes more meaningful each year.  We made a ton of fudge, toffee, peppermint patties, snack mix, & you name it.  We celebrated our Christmas Eve for the second year with friends over their fire pit grilling venison steaks & much more.  It is such a wonderful evening.  Our Christmas Day we feast for breaksfast & then worship & sing to our Living God!  Our afternoon & evening we play games & laugh ourselves silly.  We celebrate a family Wise Man's Day where we exchange handmade gifts to one another.  We do this on New Year's Day to keep material gifts apart from our focus of the Word born to us.  This allows us to enjoy after Christmas sales, too. 

The new year brought us 75 degree days!  Very strange but not unwelcome.  There will be plenty of snow before Spring.  This past Thursday we had 6 inches in just a few hours & it was beautiful!  We get stuck atop our ridge until Mark jumps on the tractor & plows us out.  The hill out can be a bobsled run straight into the river otherwise! 

Our rabbitry is thriving.  Two more weeks until butchering time for two large litters.  I have not tried a barbeque recipe with the meat thus far so I will be working to create a recipe for a red sauce based Barbequed FletchBunny!  Of course, I will be trying my now perfected NC Pulled Pork Barbeque recipe with the rabbit meat!  We will be breeding a first time doe to a borrowed buck this week to improve the line of our Californians.  Our plans are to be building new cages in the Spring to double our herd.  We have become experienced with the home treatment of ear mites & weepy eye recently.  Testing different mixtures for natural remedies has been very satisfying.

The Lord has been teaching us much, drawing us ever closer to Himself.  We see more clearly each day how the Father desires us to love the brethren with His unconditional love.  We can embrace trials more than ever knowing that, like diamonds, the process of reduction & threatened destruction causes the value to be multiplied ten-fold, enabling a matchless shine of a thousand flashes of reflected light...His light!  We are cut to shine! 

Blessed be the name of the Lord, for He is our Rock.

Free & all for Him,

Martha for all