Home to a farmer and his family has to be more than just a house with living and bedrooms because it must convert itself into a verterinary maternity hospital in the spring with sickly lambs wrapped in blankets close to the fire and premature calves being fed a special diet. Day old chicks, goslings and ducklings need to be close, but not too close, to the fireplace. The kitchen must stew gallons of feed for all the newly born animals and their exhausted mothers.
   In summer and autumn, the farmstead has to produce mountains of food to feed the harvesters and crop pickers who won't come again next year unless they are properly pampered now. In winter every nook and cranny is crammed tight with produce and preserves as well as smoked delicacies hanging from the ceiling. The family and farm workers will not be able to gather anything to eat from outside until the late spring, so the farmstead becomes a food warehouse during the bleak and cold mid winter.
   Christmas and New Year is a opportunity for revelry in an otherwise dire and depressing time of the year with 7 or 8 hours of daylignt and 16 or 17 hours of darkness each day. But after the merrymaking comes the inevitable return to work when the task will be ploughing. There is a traditional festival held the day and evening before labours are resumed on the farm which is called Plough Monday.