There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (Shakespeare)
Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to. (from Miracle on 34th Street)
Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. (from Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus)
My mother never met a superstition she didn’t like. Black cats, lurking ladders, broken mirrors, ornery umbrellas, itchy noses — they littered my childhood with fearsome warnings. If she heard of one with which she was unfamiliar, she would immediately adopt it and make it her own. When my Cajun husband, who had his own supply of superstitions from the swamps of southeast Louisiana, told her never to dig in the ground on Good Friday or else blood would gush forth, my gardener mother eagerly embraced it as definitely possible.
Mother grew up in the central Appalachian mountains, part of the oldest mountain range in North America. A big part of the legacy of these ancient mountains was a wealth of folktales, legends, traditional stories, and superstitions. She was of Scotch-Irish stock, red-haired and freckle-faced. The Scotch-Irish were not people of Scotch and Irish descent, but rather Protestant Scots from the north of Ireland, who came to this country to escape poverty, famine, debt, religious persecution, and for the sheer contrariness of it. They were a staunchly self-sufficient and independent people, these Scotch-Irish pioneers, and for all their bravery that sometimes bordered on foolhardiness, they brought with them an abundance of superstitions and fears from the ‘old country’ that shaped their lives to a great extent.
Mixed with these old Celtic customs, stories, and superstitions was another strain of folk wisdom coming from my grandmother, who was supposedly of Native American descent. I say “supposedly” because my recent reading from Ancestry.com shows not a drop of Native American blood, but instead healthy degrees of both Irish and Greek/Italian ancestry. My sister and I decided that Mother’s strange belief that she was perhaps stolen from a band of gypsies traveling through the mountains might not have been too far off.
Suffice it to say that Mother’s background, whatever strange mixture it might have been, was one that predisposed her to a whimsical turn of mind. Rather than cataloguing all the superstitions she lived by, (and which still color my life, as even today I rolled my eyes, but still tossed salt over my shoulder as I cooked Christmas dinner), let me tell you about my very favorite superstition/folktale/wonderful tradition.
And that is that at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve animals of all sorts can talk, using human speech. Perhaps this wonderful old tale, which seems to have originated in Europe, is based on the idea that speech was a gift that the Christ child’s birth conferred on the animals. Animals certainly populate our Christmas story to a significant degree — sheep, camels, donkeys, mice, dogs, cats, other assorted ‘stable’ types . . . That could mean that there would have been quite a lot of conversation going on!
Others speculate that this legend may have had pagan roots, like many of the other trappings of the season. Whatever the origins of the tale, it has grown over the centuries with many variations based on locale. One such tale from Brittany has the household animals plotting against their masters. Another, from the German Alps, has the animals foretelling the death of one of the farmhands. Another, that the animals in the stable are given the power of speech only to start bickering and insulting one another. A Native American variation has it that on Christmas Eve all of the deer in the forest fall to their knees to honor the Great Spirit.
In a recent article by Laurie Kay Olsen, she recounts an episode of the television show “Northern Exposure,” in which Chris, the local radio disc-jockey of the fictional Cicely, Alaska, has this to say: It’s an old legend that on Chistmas Eve at midnight all of the animals fall to their knees and speak, praising the newborn Jesus. Back in the winter of ’69, my dad was serving a short time for a DUI and I don’t know where my mom was. Anyway I was home alone on Christmas Eve and I stayed up extra kinda late to see if my dog, Buddy, would talk. And he did. I don’t remember his exact words, but that’s not important. But what matters is that a seven-year-old boy experienced his own personal epiphany. What’s my point? Well . . . . it’s that Christmas reveals itself to us each in a personal way, be it secular or sacred. Whatever Christmas is, and it’s many things to many people, we all own a piece of it.
Last night, on Christmas Eve, I listened, as I have every Christmas Eve night since I was a little girl, to hear the animals talk. And you know what? They always do! Perhaps you heard them, too.
I hope you had a wonderful holiday, whatever that might have been for you. And I hope that you never lose a childlike sense of wonder and faith, and belief that there are so many more things possible in this world than we have ever dreamed of.