Many legends and superstitions came to the mountains with our ancestors. One legend says that on Christmas Eve the animals talk. Bees in their hives are said to hum the melody of an ancient carol from dusk to dawn. The old people say they have heard the music of the bees and have seen cows kneel and speak. On this holy night, the plants will bloom as they did when Christ was born. Although covered with snow, underneath, the ground is covered with soft green vegetation. (from Bush’s Dorrie, Woman of the Mountains)
By now, you are very familiar with my love affair with the sound of words suggesting the thing they describe — words like moo, oink, meow, croak, roar — there’s even a term for that — onomatopoeia.
The word enchantment is like that for me. Can you even say the word without its meaning — “a feeling of great pleasure and attraction, especially because of something’s beauty” — filling you up? I would have read Thomas Moore’s wonderful book The Enchantment of Everyday Life for its title alone.
And the idea of animals talking on Christmas Eve fills me with such enchantment.
Back in the 1970s, my husband and I gave up a successful practice in the swamps of Louisiana and moved a thousand miles northeast into these ancient mountains where I had been born, following a dream of self-sufficient farming. One of the first things we did was to build a small barn and get some animals.
And every Christmas Eve, without fail, at midnight I would go to the barn to “hear the animals talk.” My mother, who, as I have told you before, never met a superstition she didn’t like, of course was a believer, and had always told me it was so, that indeed the animals talked at midnight. Not only that, but they bowed down.
And it was true! Because I believed, I indeed could hear the soft murmurings of the animals to each other in the half light of the outdoor dawn to dusk lamp. As the animals knelt in the fragrant hay, it was easy for me to imagine what they were saying to one another about a night 2000 years ago.
(Maybe one could say that had I gone out every night, instead of only on Christmas Eve, I would have heard the same murmurings and mutterings: “Move over, Joe, you always hog the space.” “Strawberry, your tail is tickling my nose, and making me sneeze.” “Bunny, did you hear what Al did today?”)
Thomas Hardy was a novelist at the turn of the twentieth century, a century marked by world wars and unspeakable atrocities, truly a time of disenchantment. But he also wrote poetry, and one poem, The Oxen, so evocatively demonstrates a longing for that lost enchantment. He takes us into a group of people gathered in maybe a small tavern or cottage: it is a lovely poem, and I invite you to read it in its entirety— here are just a few paraphrases: Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they art all on their knees,” an elder said as we sat in a flock by the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where they knelt in their strawy pen, nor did it occur to one of us there to doubt they were kneeling then . . . If someone now said “come see the oxen kneel,” I would go with him in the gloom, hoping it might be so . . .
It is up to you, of course, just how enchanted you want to be this Christmas Eve. Me? I’m gonna listen.
And if you truly listen, you will hear.
