New year? No sweat

It’s a new year, so I will need to constantly remind myself not to accidentally write 2024 when dating checks and signing documents for the next couple of months. I hope that your holiday season was full of family, friends, food and fun. We did our usual week plus a few days of celebrating Christmas and New Year. I think this year we attended five separate Christmas parties and shared the gift of sweating together with anyone who wanted to participate.

No, I’m not talking about hanging out at Grandma’s house with the heat turned up too high and lots of people crammed in a small kitchen. Emily and I usually give our whole family one big gift to enjoy together as well as everyone getting a couple of smaller individual gifts. The last few years the family gift has been a trip somewhere, but this year we are taking the kids on a family ski trip to Colorado, which they’ve known about because we’ve been planning it for a couple of years. A trip we’ve been planning on doing for a couple of years wouldn’t make a very good gift, but we thought of something almost as good or maybe even better. We bought a portable sauna tent.

My friend from college, John Takala, has a dairy farm near Hibbing, Minnesota. Maybe you knew this already, but there is a big Finnish cultural influence from the immigrants who moved there to work in the iron mines. One of the best cultural practices they brought to Minnesota, in my opinion, is the sauna. I mention my friend John because his family has one of my favorite saunas I’ve ever had the pleasure of sitting in. Not because it’s in a picturesque setting on a lake or in an old-growth pine woods. It’s next to their house a couple hundred feet from their calf barn. It’s so neat to me because it’s not a vacation kind of event to fire up the sauna and relax after a day of farming; they use it daily. John set a goal to take a sauna every day that he’s not gone from the farm. When I texted him yesterday to check if he’s still doing it, he said he’s on day 1,747. He’s behind his uncle who inspired the goal by a year or two.

With the frigid weather that has been here the last week or so, we are enjoying our new nightly ritual of firing up the wood stove in the sauna after dinner. When we get up to the house from milking cows we head out to the sauna for 20-30 minutes and relax while listening to music and chatting. After we get good and hot we take our time walking back to the house, enjoying the fact that, for at least a bit of our day spent outside, the negative temperatures feel great. If there was some snow, we’d probably roll around in it. We got to do that the first day we had the sauna set up before the 40-plus degree days and rain after Christmas melted it all. We had a gorgeous day for hosting the big Zweber family Christmas with everyone outside enjoying the sun and unseasonably warm weather. But the mud that weather made has become an issue. Popping skid loader tires off the rim in frozen ruts is an endlessly frustrating occurrence and always seems to happen at the worst times, generally on Sunday morning when I’m already late getting done with chores and want to get to church.

Until next time, keep living that dream and don’t forget to find time during or at the end of your day to relax. I hear that lowering your stress levels leads to a longer life, or something like that. That’s probably true, and I bet if health researchers looked into the stress levels of farmers they’d wonder how we live past 40 in the first place. Maybe hugging cows and calves is as good of stress relief as they say. We’ve never rented out our cows for people to hug or do yoga with, but I bet a number of our herd would love it if we did.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.