Perhaps it is so...

My mother tells me that when she was a little girl on the farm, each Christmas Eve she would huddle with her brothers and sisters around the table and hear the same old tale, told in hushed tones by her father.
According to the story, the animals, the cows and the horses, and even the chickens, spoke to each other on this night alone. All of the chores had to be meticulously done on this night, the hay adequately spread in the barn, all troughs filled, and pens swept clean, in honor of this one night of animalian verbal congress.
I wonder if the following poem, written before my mother's time, influenced at all the oral legend she was told...

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are 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 dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

-- Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928) –

Merry Christmas & Happy holidays!
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