XVThe kitchen on Christmas Eve morning was apparently chaos. Ase stood baffled in the doorway, with no place to set down the milk buckets. His hands were numb with cold, his nose felt frostbitten. The center work-table seemed to have had a vast cornucopia spilled at random across it. The big gray goose lay ready for plucking, apples, onions, Hubbard squash, raisins were piled around it, a pan of crumbled bread would become stuffing, a bowl of cracked hickory-nuts needed to have the meats extracted, cranberries would make a ruby sauce, ears of pop-corn wanted hulling, a basket of eggs awaited a broken sacrifice. The kitchen sink was piled with used bowls, the table between sink and stove was covered with buttered cake tins, Nellie was spooning batter into a row of them with machine precisio
