Holiday Eggs

I do most of my baking in the two weeks before Christmas, mostly sugar cookies and shortbread, but sometimes pecan chewies or a pie and once in a while a cake.  I clear out the kitchen and haul in a storehouse of sugar and flour, nuts, dyes, spices --everything but the eggs.  I don't buy eggs because we raise those here.  


Just look at this bird! If I had a hair day as

bad as hers, I might skip work, too.

I say we raise them here, but this time of year our supply can be a little iffy because our hens stop showing up for work. They are molting right now -- visibly shedding -- and there is a deep wind row of feathers beneath their roost in the chicken house. It's odd that they start just as the weather turns cold, being half-naked for most of it, but they do. In our climate, they start in mid-November and shed right through the holidays. They won't lay again until they have a bright new coat of feathers sometime in January.

Fortunately, it's just the A-Team, the mature hens, who molt.  The Junior Varsity, born last spring and still sporting brand new feathers from the summer, are on the sideline, and we call them in.  They have only been laying for a few months, so their eggs are smallish, but they pull us through. 

We have just two youngsters on the job this year and they are laying a single egg a day.  So this time of the year, we are strategizing all the time.  Shall we eat it or save it?  Shall we go ahead and make sugar cookies or save up for a coconut cake?  Can we afford to give this egg away or should we hoard it with the others?  Ah Lordy, the holidays.  I hope Santa can't see this.

And we strategize over the hens, too, buying a couple of chicks each spring just for the holiday eggs. We figure that if most of them live for seven years, as they tend to do, our flock will top out at around a dozen. And for us that's a pretty good number.
Twelve hens should give us a thriving egg business next summer. We'll have two or three dozen a week to sell, plenty for grits and eggs on the weekends, and a few left over to bake with. The new girls will keep the flock young. Their eggs will help pay for chicken feed, endow the chicken retirement fund, and give my husband a little walking around money for the Starbucks coffee he craves. That way, everybody gets what they need, and nobody gets edgy.

And, of course, the baked goods are tasty, too. Pecan chewies this year and a couple of caramel cakes -- all made with fresh, home-grown, not jumbo but big enough eggs. You have to love the holidays. Nothing says lovin' like somethin' in the oven.