Farm Christmas: December on a Working Cattle Farm
What a farm Christmas is really like on a fifth-generation cattle farm: feed and hay every morning, the shipping rush, then the family.
For most people, Christmas is the one stretch of the year when work stops.
Asked about the hardest part of Christmas for a farm family, Gray Shipley said:
“On the farm you don't get to get away, and you don't get the rest that you need. I think that's a part of what makes farming such a grind.”
Gray Shipley
Word for word, as recorded
On the farm you don't get to get away and you don't get the rest that you need i think that's a part of what makes farming such a grind.
The cattle still need feed and hay every morning, whatever the date and whatever the weather. On this farm December is also the busiest month of the year, because it is when the Christmas boxes ship.
What a farm Christmas looks like in December
Some years the farm sells wreaths, so there is Fraser fir in the air and sap on your hands. Otherwise, Gray says, it smells like a farm. What you see is the scramble: beef coming out of the freezer and into boxes, labeled and handed to the carrier, while shoppers start arriving at the farm store and the road up to the farm gets busy.
It starts long before December. The gift boxes are planned in July and August, the bigger orders come in from September, and the first shipping day is the Monday after Thanksgiving. Steak Gift Box Delivery for Christmas has the timing.
When the family's own Christmas happens
Shipping runs until it is too late to ship anything, and the farm store stays open for the last-minute shoppers after that. Only then does anybody turn to the holiday itself.
“And sometimes our Christmas celebration tends to kind of fall after the holiday and linger into that next week.”
Gray Shipley
Word for word, as recorded
And sometimes our christmas celebration tends to kind of fall after the holiday and linger into that next week.
The part that makes it worth it
Around Christmas the messages start coming in: pictures of a roast, a sausage or a steak on somebody's table.
“Sometimes the folks that have decided to replace the turkey with a roast, a prime rib, something better. Sometimes it's just a sausage or something that they've incorporated.”
Gray Shipley
Word for word, as recorded
Sometimes the folks that have decided to replace the turkey with a roast a prime rib something better sometimes it's just a sausage or something that they've incorporated.
Gray says it makes the family proud that people think something from this farm is special enough to be part of their celebration. The farm has been in the family since 1872, and Shipley Farms Since 1872 tells the longer story.
The family's own Christmas dinner has a long history too: An Old Fashioned Christmas Dinner Menu From Grandmother's Long Table.
A roast feeds a table and asks very little of you once it is cooking.
View Product
A dry-aged standing rib roast, raised and aged here in the mountains.
View ProductWritten at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. He recorded these answers himself, at the farm, in the autumn of 2026. The play button under each quote is that recording, exactly as he said it, and the words under it are a word-for-word transcript. In the written quotes, hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Reviewed 9 November 2026.
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