Christmas Day at Maple Leaf Gardens

We had a nice quiet day for Christmas this year.

We went to the Christmas Eve service (and there was none this morning) so we had no where to go. Which was very nice considering the wet windy weather. Miserable, if you have to be out in it. But we did not.

I was knitting and blogging. Peggy was trying out her first crocheted plarn bag. Warren was manning the remotes. Troy was out doing his thing in the shop. (He's getting dangerously close to finishing the taping of the drywall, and has been priming/painting in spots where he's already moving stuff in.)

When we had enough of doing next to nothing, Peggy got us going on our popcorn project. I had mentioned that I wanted to shell some of the copious popcorn we had so I could bring some to my sister tomorrow. Troy had mentioned he just needed to grab the sheller out of the garage. (Doing it by hand is possible but not very handy or comfortable. Last time I did some I wore leather gloves and still got a couple blisters.) And we had a lot of corn to do: two Rubbermaid tubs full.

It turned into a three-person job. They rotated duties, but in this pic, Troy (center) is feeding the cobs into the sheller and turning the crank to do the actual shelling. Warren dealing with the emptied cobs and finishing the shelling on cobs the sheller didn't complete. (It was made for fieldcorn and didn't really like the smaller cobs.)
Peggy is holding a cob against the sheller to try to improve the shelling of the smaller cobs.

(I took a video of the sheller in action and if I get somewhere I can use a fast-speed connection sometime soon, I'll upload it. Make sure to check out all the popcorn flying out the top too--we had a lot of sweeping up to do!)

Troy had built a wooden box to mount the sheller onto (this was way back when we lived in the last house). It's since been repurposed as a kindling box, but we emptied it out, cleaned it out, and got it set up again for the sheller.
By the time we had emptied the two tubs of corncobs, we had 31.5" x 10.5" x 6" of corn in the box. That's almost 2000 cubic inches of corn which is just about a US bushel if my online converter worked right.

If you want to see it in a more familiarly sized tub (I'm assuming), here it is after we poured it back into the [14 gal] Rubbermaid tub:
So all of you who have been invited often to our house, I will give a word of caution: you may be put to work! For surely, how many of you put your Christmas guests to work? We are shameless.

Merry Christmas!