Christmas at The Ranch

We had a wonderful, white Christmas at The Ranch, but not without a little improvising. However, since my husband is the King of Improvising, I wasn't worried.

For instance, why fret over not having a refrigerator when we can do this...

And who needs a bathroom door when a leftover piece of ceiling board will do the trick?

Being the planner that I am, I cooked our Christmas meal at home before going to The Ranch, just in case Neal wasn't able to get our new stove connected for some reason....which is what happened because he didn't have the right fitting. No worries, we just reheated everything on our Coleman camp stove and it was just as good.

And for dinner Christmas night, I had prepared french onion soup. We toasted the french bread on our camp stove grill, but I was unsure how we would get that golden, bubbly cheese effect on top of the soup. How dare I give it a second thought, because the King of Improvising stepped in with the propane blow torch and voila!


As we ate, we were warmed by the heat of our trusty little wood stove...

and reminded of the joy of the season by admiring our tabletop fiberoptic tree...

The next day when the hardware store opened, Neal went to town and got the correct fitting for the stove. He was able to install it with no problems and now we have a fully functioning stove ready to prepare our next Ranch meal!

I tidied up the kitchen area and organized our drawers and cabinets. Everything is so much easier to find than it was in our little pop-up camper!

Although the pipes were still frozen and we didn't bathe for two days, we still had a special Christmas enjoying the simpler things in life that we so often take for granted. We both agreed our first Christmas at The Ranch was exactly as we had hoped...

except for that bathing part!