On Christmas

Midwinter magic, interspecies conversations, and two poems

When I was a child, my sisters and I were told (and believed) that on Christmas Eve when the clock struck midnight, for one hour all of the animals could talk to one another. This was a magical happening, and also a secret: if we were to try to stay awake and observe this convening (which I suggested on a number of occasions), the magic would be broken.

In my early childhood, we lived in a suburban house with a wide swath of woods behind, and always cohabitated with at least one cat and one or two dogs. Later, we moved to a seven-acre farm and in addition to the animals who shared our house, we also lived alongside chickens, Nubian goats, alpacas, horses and a pony, two barn cats, and a pig, not to mention all of the other wild creatures–birds, squirrels, mice and moles, raccoons, snakes and lizards, turtles and toads, deer–that shared the land. At that point, imagining the conversations that would take place on this sacred night became even more mysterious. What, given the brief gift of a shared language, would all of these creatures say to one another?

from Children of the Forest by Elsa Beskow

My sister Brita and I also, for a time, were convinced that our black and white cat, Chrissy, was actually a tomte (a Swedish, gnome-like person) that could shapeshift into cat form. We spent many hours trying to catch her in her true form by sneaking up on her, or by keeping her closed in a room with us for periods, hoping that she would have to let go of the act at some point. Chrissy was a good sport. On Christmas Eve, we left cookies out for Santa Claus, lichen and carrots out for the reindeer, and porridge out for the house tomte. We knew that we needed to take good care of our tomte if he was to keep taking good care of us and our farm.

Christmas rituals have always been an important part of my family culture, and I’ve been thinking about what the holiday means to me these days as a non-Christian whose inherited spiritual practices have Christian ties. This week,

Jonathan Rowson

over at The Joyous Struggle published a post about the Christmas story that resonated with me, writing:

I am most struck by the fundamental co-incidences in the 2000-year-old story, in the old Latin sense of co-incidence; not just two things happening at the same time, but of two kinds of things falling upon together. In the Christmas story, I see the coinciding of eternity and time, the coinciding of heaven and earth, the coinciding of spirit and flesh, and the coinciding of God and humanity. What a coincidence!

I like this interpretation of Christmas as a powerful confluence, a falling together, of things, because it gets at the sense of magic and outside-of-timeness that clings to the holiday, in part due to its pagan roots. In addition to the coincidences that Rowson mentions, I would add the coinciding of darkness and light, and the coinciding of species seen through the importance of the farm animals to the nativity story, and, in the wonderful inter-species conversations that took place between your pets and their wild neighbors last night.

So, on this Christmas day, I thought I’d offer two poems of co-incidence in honor of this season’s particular magic. The first is by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translated from the Irish by poet Medbh McGuckian. The second is by Canadian poet Heather Davidson.

A God Shows Up
by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

The sacred fountain sprinkles the monastery cloister;
a bat startles the air. We are tossing back
a wine-taster’s finest blends, his choicest,
the saintly hand parries every attack. 

On the edge of my eye, at imagination’s quick,
I sense the spots of a panther drawing close—
he pads through the chamber on silent paws
to drink his stomachful of wine; the prick

of his toothblade is still safely under wraps,
his foreclaws relaxed in their sheath.
Though he flexes his tail in light and dark gaps,
flickering indifferently between life and death. 

And I’ve nothing to offer in oblation
to this god who can also show up as a bull
or a snake-like monster-escort for the departed
but what’s left after a pub-crawl of my soul. 

Vulpes 
by Heather Davidson

I was a fox before you knew me.
Felt things better with paws
that gave in to each crevice of pine needle,
killed prey quick with playful leaps
to make dark blood flowers bloom
in the snow. It might be the laughter
I miss most, open to teeth and the rest
came through. You begin to suspect
what a trick it is, having any kind of body.
Cold nips and carves, winter rattles
the trees’ bones. But the elms give nothing
away. They were how I used to think
of the living, until I was human
and I knew the living would want more.

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Merry Christmas, or as they say in Sweden,