Christmas at Bemborough Farm was a special time in a special childhood. I feel very privileged to have grown up here, where I still live and farm, and celebrate Christmases with my own family.
When we were kids, a week before Christmas, it was time to sort out the turkey. We have never farmed these birds commercially but Dad used to buy around 25 chicks every year for friends and family, and for our own Christmas feast.
Turkeys have to be plucked while they are still warm, so that the feathers come out more easily. It was all hands on deck, and we children were expected to do our bit in the turkey sheds.
One year while we plucked, Dad told us a story about two elderly spinster ladies in the Cotswolds who kept a turkey for their Christmas meal, feeding it up in the same way that we did.
After slaughtering it, plucking it and hanging it, they went to the turkey shed the following day to discover the bird, flapping upside down; it had not been properly killed.
Christmas at Bemborough Farm was a special time in a special childhood
I feel very privileged to have grown up here, where I still live and farm, and celebrate Christmases with my own family
They could not bring themselves to kill it, and kept it as a pet. They knitted a sweater for it, because having plucked out the feathers, the bird had no protection from the weather, and he gobbled around their yard for the rest of his days.
But, despite tales such as this, as farmers, and as the children of farmers, we accepted the rhythm of lovingly caring for livestock and then equally accepting that feeding humans was the ultimate aim, and this involves slaughter.
And at least our birds were spared the long walk to market endured by turkeys in centuries gone by.
In the late 16th Century, 250,000 turkeys were walked to the Leadenhall meat and poultry market in London in time for Christmas, often from great distances.
Christmas Eve in my childhood was all about getting excited for the day ahead. By then the house was fully decorated – though as late as the 1950s it was a country tradition that farmers would not decorate their homes until Christmas Eve itself, probably because that was the first time those hard-working families took any time off.
Alongside rare breeds of cattle and sheep, we also had reindeer until Dad had a nasty experience with Rudolph, the bull of the herd.
He was normally a placid fellow who towed us kids around on a sledge when there was snow but one year during the rutting season he clearly thought Dad was a rival for the affections of the does in his harem and pinned him to the ground by his antlers.
The strong animal began shaking his head but, luckily, Dad’s screaming brought the stockman running, who had to beat Rudolph off with a stick.
After that, Dad decided it wasn’t safe to keep the herd and Rudolph and his girls flew off to Whipsnade Zoo. But our Christmases were no less festive without them.
After the opening of the stockings, Dad pulled on his wellies, his old tweed jacket and his flat cap to do the rounds of the animals: sheep, cattle, pigs, horses and the hens in the farmyard
It was a freezing winter, with heavy snow. The Cotswolds were enveloped in it, and our high farm had more than its share. It made for a lovely picturesque, Christmassy scene
When we were small, we woke up very excited, as all children do, on Christmas morning.
After the opening of the stockings, Dad pulled on his wellies, his old tweed jacket and his flat cap to do the rounds of the animals: sheep, cattle, pigs, horses and the hens in the farmyard.
We children always begged to go with him and one freezing winter, when I was ten, I remember hanging on for dear life to a tarpaulin laden with hay bales and animal feed, which was being dragged across the snowbound fields by a steady, plodding, good-natured shire horse called Kitty.
It was a freezing winter, with heavy snow. The Cotswolds were enveloped in it, and our high farm had more than its share. It made for a lovely picturesque, Christmassy scene.
But I may not be popular when I say the last thing I or any farmer wants is a white Christmas. It’s a nightmare with livestock to feed and keep watered.
Last December we had another big freeze, and we all had to run around breaking the ice on the troughs and using a blowtorch to unfreeze pipes.
Everywhere looked very pretty, but the animals don’t like it and nor do we. If snow falls over Christmas, when most of the staff are off, then it falls to me and the senior management team – and anyone who lives close – to give us a hand.
IN 1998, Mum and Dad moved into a smaller house a few miles away and it was time for me to take over the farm, my partner Charlie and I raising our children Ella and Alfie, now 24 and 21, at Bemborough.
Mum loved the idea that the farmhouse where she brought up her children had another generation of little ones to marvel at the lights on the tree and the enchantment of Father Christmas visiting us — though that ended rather sooner for Alfie than we had intended.
One Christmas Eve, when he was about ten, he had his suspicions about Santa confirmed when Charlie and I, giggling because we’d enjoyed a glass of wine or two (or three), tiptoed into his room to fill his stocking.
Only as we were leaving did I spot a small light flashing in the corner of the room: it was the motion sensor camera we’d given him so he could film badgers, foxes and other nocturnal animals around the farm. We were caught red-handed.
Like many people, I’d inherited such traditions from my own parents and our first Christmas without Dad, who died in October 2015, was especially strange. Dad loved Christmas and he was always at the centre of it.
It was difficult to face it only two months after his death so my sister Becca invited us all to hers for a few days, which at least meant Mum would not have to face sitting in their beloved former farmhouse feeling his loss even more acutely.
In the run-up to the following Christmas, I filmed a Countryfile episode in the Scottish Borders, where sheepdogs were traditionally allowed into carol services because the church ministers recognised that they followed their masters until the ends of the earth and would not be left outside a church if their owner was inside.
I joined in with the choir at Bowden Kirk, just south of Melrose in the border country, and as we rose to give full voice to While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night’, the dogs stayed quiet.
This, apparently, was not the case in years gone by, when the whole service was conducted sitting down. If the shepherds stood up to sing, their dogs also got up and started heading for the door, assuming they were off back to the hills.
We spent that Christmas back at Bemborough. Late in the frosty afternoon, I put on a warm jacket and took the dogs out for their last walk of the day.
There is nothing I like more than going out when the sun is low in the sky and the light is a faded golden colour, and looking up to see a barn owl flying low and silent up the hedgerow.
There is also something very special about being out at night when the winter air is clear and cold, and the sky is full of stars, listening to the owls calling and the foxes barking, and I especially felt it without Dad.
After he died, I noticed the robins on the farm more than I had done before. ‘When robins appear, loved ones are near,’ says the old country rhyme and whenever I see a robin hopping around the garden, I think of Dad, and I give a nod to the bird.
Nature feels more present, perhaps, when we’ve lost someone and increasingly I’ve been reflecting on the importance of Christmas; that it’s about being together, and is a time for family. This was brought home to me in 2021, which started as the worst year of my life.
Over the Christmas of 2020, Charlie had a bad tummy, which persisted into the New Year.
After months of tests, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a cancer with a survival rate of only around 5 per cent. For weeks we lived on a knife-edge, unsure whether her disease was terminal.
There was a possibility that she had a rarer and less invasive form, which has a better prognosis and, while we waited to find out, Charlie told me that she wanted us to get married.
It was something we’d never felt we needed to do but, in Charlie’s words, ‘suddenly, it was the most important thing in the world.
I really wanted everyone to know how much I love Adam; most importantly, I wanted him to know.’ Looking back, our wedding that September was a great distraction.
By then, we had learned that the cancer was the less invasive kind, but the tumour was in a difficult place and the surgeon wasn’t sure if it could be removed successfully.
Charlie was due to go in for the operation the day after the ceremony, and when I saw her walking in to Stroud Register Office on the arm of her mum, I struggled to hold it together.
Although the registrar knew nothing of what was happening in our lives, she commented that it was one of the most loving and emotional weddings she had ever presided over.
Thankfully, the operation went well but recovery is ongoing. We live from one six-monthly scan to the next and everything in life is different after the experience we’ve both been through.
Our family and friends are even more important to us and we try not to stress over the small things, as in Christmas 2021 when – only three months after Charlie’s operation – we were supposed to be spending Christmas Day with her sister Vicky and her family.
King Charles III, patron of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST), right, is introduced to Victoria, a Suffolk Punch horse by farmer and television personality Adam Henson, left, during a visit to Cotswold Farm Park in Guiting Power
Adam Henson with his dog in the snow
On Christmas morning, we discovered that Charlie’s brother-in-law had tested positive for Covid and so everyone was diverted to Bemborough.
Although it wasn’t what we had planned, we had come so close to never having Christmas together that a small change to our plans was not going to derail our day. The main thing was that Charlie was doing well.
My Christmas routine nowadays is only slightly different from the one of my childhood. The food is traditional, much the same as Mum would have served.
I’m in charge of the turkey – just thinking about that aroma when it comes out of the Aga makes my mouth water.
Roast potatoes – who doesn’t love them? Carrots, parsnips, sprouts, delicious stuffing and ladles of gravy. Afterwards, we have our traditional dog walk and then play cards.
As we get into bed at the end of the day, the house I’ve grown up in creaks like a human being breathing. It’s nice to think that future generations will share the magic of this time of year at Bemborough.
I hope you, too, have a magical Christmas, reliving your own Christmas memories and dreaming of the many Christmases to come. From me, and every creature at Bemborough and the Farm Park, Happy Christmas.
© Adam Henson, 2023
- Christmas On The Farm by Adam Henson (Little Brown, £22). To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to 30/12/2023; UK P&P valid on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
