The Sky Is Falling

Rat-a-tat-tat-bing-ping-bing "Watch out, cover your heads!"

No, we were not under enemy fire from some hillbilly feud; it was just the sky falling!

Actually it is our chestnuts raining down from above! The three chestnut trees are right next to our house and on the other side of the trees there is an out building with a metal roof and when these chestnuts fall they make all kind of racket! Everyday there has been 5 to 10 chestnuts on the sidewalk leading to our front porch and we have even had chestnuts shoot up off a bounce and land on our porch before!

Do you know how heavy these chestnuts are falling? Why, a person could say that these chestnuts are falling at such a heavy rate, all you have to do is set a dozen or so empty bowls down under the trees and leave them there. Come back in 5 or 10 minutes and the bowls would be overflowing with nuts! But that would be exaggerating some... I could continue the tall tale by saying that these nuts are sooo big and heavy that they put dents all over the car that might get parked underneath the trees! And a person needs to be under a strong umbrella when they are collecting the bowlfuls or else they are liable to get knocked unconscious! But those statements would be exaggerating some too...

Actually it has been fairly hard work collecting the chestnuts because of all the stooping over to pick them up, and those sharp prickly hulls always hurt somehow, even wearing gloves! Also it takes quite a bit of searching through the grass and under leaves to find the chestnuts. They are all over but you still have to search them out. You also have to pry the hulls away from some of them to get the 2 or 3 nuts out. If I am collecting them by myself it takes about an hour to get the equivalent of a gallon bag full. I am trying to only keep the best ones and dispose of those that are already getting a bit moldy or if they have any crack or hole in it. I am also filling up large buckets (old 20 lb birdseed buckets) with the hulls to clear the yard so we can see when new ones have fallen. So far I have dumped 6 bucketfuls of the hulls across the road. (It just crossed my mind that they might be good in a compost pile? We have never done composting but it seems like it would be a great idea). We have been putting about a gallon bag of good looking, clean chestnuts in the refrigerator every day and we have 4 or 5 bags full now. (We still need to clean today and yesterday's harvest and put them in bags.) We read in The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery that you can keep them for several months in the refrigerator in bags with holes in them for air, and even longer in the freezer! We will see.

Tonight Lisa is trying a Chestnut Puree recipe from the Emery book to go with our supper. I am traditionally not a big nut eater but I really like the idea of eating good food that God is literally allowing to grow on trees for us and all we have to do is pick them up! Some sources call chestnuts "Tree Corn" because of all the excellent nutrition they contain and so many possible uses for it!

Eight-year-old Christina has had the most fun with the chestnut hunting and has been the biggest helper collecting them. She has not likened it to what I am about to mention, and Lisa thought I shouldn't point it out to her, either, because of our feeling toward it. What I am talking about is that searching through the grass for the nuts and being excited when you find some, reminds me of an annual spring event that my family does not partake of; an Easter Egg hunt.

It looks like this is a good time for me to chase a rabbit trail.  Call me strange if you want, but eggs and bunnies really have nothing to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ and I think it is a tragedy that the "church" allows its children to get so excited about Easter Bunnies and Easter eggs and Easter candy. When they get older and can no longer participate in the egg hunts, just celebrating the resurrection of Jesus is boring for them and not very much "fun". At our home we try to keep the focus at Easter on celebrating Christ and do not want our children distracted with the nonsense of the world. The one or two egg hunts we did participate in left a bad taste with us, especially when the church does the hunt immediately following the Easter morning worship service! The children are generally not interested in the worship, only when it will be over so they can have fun. At least the church we are attending now does their egg hunt on Saturday and tries to use it as an outreach to the community. There are many children around who do not come to church except for things like that and it is possible that they will hear the gospel explained, but is seems difficult to me, and we did not participate. I did not mean to editorialize so much here. Maybe I will share more on our thoughts about Easter in the spring? This post is about our chestnuts! Anyway, my whole point is that it has been kind of fun searching for and finding the chestnuts. Children can have fun without all the worldly mechanisms in motion.

We would still like to hear from anyone that may have some experiences with benefiting from chestnuts and could suggest anything that may be helpful for us. There are still very many nuts on the trees so it looks like we should have several more days of collecting them. Other years we have collected the nuts, only to let most of them ruin. We are going to try hard not to let that happen this year!

1 comment
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mc2rwe on September 28, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Well I have no comments on the chestnuts but I applaud you on your lack of "bunny belief". We never allowed our children to participate in egg hunts or halloween celebrations. Much to the horror of most of our family… About a year ago my second son asked if he could have his share of the money that we saved on not buying all of that stuff when they were little… we just laughed.

Kathy