Food and Friends Make the Holidays Special on a Family-Owned Farm in Washington

Editor’s note: This article was sponsored by the Dairy Farmers of Washington.

Holidays on a Washington dairy farm are different. There are no quiet snow-dusted mornings or long, leisurely days off. But woven between chores and muddy boots are beloved holiday traditions that make the season feel like more than just another winter day. They help farm families and their communities pause and connect, even when the work doesn’t stop.

“We love the holidays. We think it’s super magical and we love that it’s a time for us to look in the eyes of all the people that we work with at such a fast pace every single day and to actually slow down, talk and spend time with each other,” says Ashley Kenny of Darilane Farms, a multigeneration family dairy north of Spokane. Darilane keeps 220 dairy cows, raises Angus beef on the side and grows more than 1,000 acres of alfalfa to feed them all.

It is a bigger operation than the one Kenny’s grandfather Richard bought when he was only 19 years old. Today Kenny’s mother manages the farm that employs her and her brother Garrett, while their two other siblings pitch in when help is needed. All four of them live nearby and still celebrate the holidays in their grandparents’ farmhouse kitchen.

Creating family traditions

“Something that my husband and I talk about, wanting to make memories with our kids, is that memories are not usually one-off. They are the things that happened day after day, holiday after holiday, year after year, things you can always rely on,” Kenny says.

When she was a child, her mother used to wake the children before dawn with loud Christmas music so they could open presents before she went out to feed the cows.

“The nice thing was, we had things to entertain ourselves with while she was feeding, and then she would come back and we’d all eat together. That was really fun,” remembers Kenny. Even so, rather than wake sleeping toddlers, Kenny lets her own 2- and 4-year-old daughters sleep in. Like many parents, Kenny is still working out the balance between the holiday traditions of her childhood and developing new traditions with her young family.

“Growing up, we showed livestock and we would usually decorate some of our show cows. We painted ‘Merry Christmas’ on them one time and put Santa hats on them. We’ve done silly stuff like that in the past with our animals,” she says of a tradition that her own daughters may revive when they are old enough. In the meantime, they still decorate the milking barn with fake poinsettias and a painted fireplace with stockings for all the employees. It’s something fun for the grown-ups, who — unlike the kids — never get to sleep in.

“We still have to farm. As a kid, holidays were nothing short of magical and you never really thought anything about that. You really only start to notice the logistics once you become a parent yourself. Now that I’m older, holidays are still a time to get things done that have to be done,” says Kenny. And since the farm employees get the day off to spend with their families, there’s even more that needs to be done at Christmas. “Then, when you’re resting, it is far more intentional because there’s such a clear contrast between work and resting with family. And I do think that the food tastes better if you’ve just come in from four hours of work.”

Cherished time preparing holiday dinner

Food is a critical component of any holiday, and Christmas dinner at Darilane Farms feeds dozens of people from multiple generations and households.

“We invite a lot of people to our holidays from church and especially a lot of widows and widowers. And they all just kind of sit back and laugh while we fly in and out of the house taking care of cows,” says Kenny.

Christmas dinner may be sandwiched between milking and feeding times, but if time is limited the food is not. To feed so many people — and because they grow their own beef — turkey is only one of the protein options.

“If we don’t have beef alongside turkey, there would be a revolt from the guys in our family and our kids, too. They’re big fans of steak and brisket. We usually have a couple of people who know how to smoke meat really well. So we usually do a brisket and a turkey, and maybe also a ham. But definitely always a brisket at a holiday,” says Kenny.

Mashed potatoes are another holiday staple. They use a simple recipe that doesn’t skimp on the butter and half-and-half, topped with some garlic salt. And at every holiday for the last 10 years, someone cracks a joke about the time a 16-year-old Ashley, wearing a tiara, made mashed potatoes on live TV to promote a holiday food drive in her role as a Dairy Ambassador.

Keeping dessert nice and easy

Surprisingly, the family doesn’t do a lot of holiday baking, instead favoring less time-consuming desserts. One exception is her brother-in-law’s cranberry walnut pie made with an all-butter crust. Passed down in his family from his own grandmother, the pie has become a Darilane Farms Christmas tradition, cherished as a next-day breakfast with coffee. Although it’s relatively new to her family, Kenny says, “For some reason, a cranberry walnut pie topped with homemade whipped cream is one of the most nostalgic holiday traditions that we have now.”

For many people, eggnog is the first dairy-based holiday treat that comes to mind. In Kenny’s family, there is a running debate over whether eggnog is best served hot like cocoa or cold. She’s team cold.

“Personally, my favorite way to drink eggnog is very childish; you put Sprite in it. It just lightens it up.”

When asked for an eggnog recipe she says, “Do we make our own eggnog? No, Darigold makes pretty amazing eggnog so we can rely on that.”

But no matter how many time-saving tricks the family uses or how the details of the day change over time, there is one immutable tradition they always honor: the prayer that precedes every holiday meal.

“That’s the tradition that means the most to me, because it was important enough that we made it happen every single time we gathered and we still do. We don’t touch the food until we’ve prayed. We wait until everybody’s in the house. The last person in is almost always my mom or my brother coming in from the cows and you can feel the cold air walk in with them. We wait patiently for them to wash their hands and then we all hold hands in my grandma’s farmhouse kitchen, and my grandpa usually says a note of thanks for the year. We take a moment to thank the people who are there, a lot of whom help make the farm run, and then we give thanks to God for our meal. We think it’s important to gather. But we think it’s more important to thank God for the things that he’s given us and the people he’s given us.”