Christmas Dirt

It isn't your usual gift.  It is what they want, however.  The wait has been long enough, and Christmas Day seems to be the time for fulfilling their wish:  dirt please.

Begging for Dirt!

Several "slips" of zygote cactus traveled home with me from my mother's. That was in June.  Of course, they needed to hang out in water long enough to put out some healthy roots.  That growth goal was reached by the end of July.  They continued their patient wait.

In the dirt of their dreams

The fall found them draped like dreads over the squash on my kitchen counter.  And now the guilt, or the Blessings of the Season, or the Gift of Christmas moves me to fulfill their hopes.   Things I get to do today will be to find their potting soil and to give them their dirt.

May all your hopes and dreams come true this Christmas Season.  Merriest of all to YOU!

Christmas Jewels

I'd come out to sweep debris off the patio, and there they were.  Gems like these certainly would have been part of the gifts brought by Magi and Wise Men and Worshippers to the Christ Child.  To find them scattered rather carelessly on the cold, wet and littered pavers seemed inappropriate at best.








But Nature is like that--not attached to her beauty, letting it go graciously and without hesitation, casting her pearls and gems before the common folk.   With that ease she is able to create again and again with the seasons, her abundance flowing because she never holds back.

Safire, Amethyst, Turquoise semi-precious "stones"

The Porcelain Berry Vine has been dropping her jewels for weeks now, some to the birds and some to the patio. I've always thought the berries were prettiest amongst their leaves and don't recall seeing them so near winter.  But this, this takes my breath away and gives new perspective to all other Things I get to do today.

Chicken Christmas

Handsome cardoons are artichoke cousins.  Stalks are edible.

Cardoons are a favorite Christmas present--if you're a chicken.  We all live in our own little world.  From the human view point, we would say that we see the real world.  However, there is a dog world, a cat world, a worm world and a chicken world and a. . .    Every sentient being has its own world.  In my chickens' world, cardoons are Christmas.







What is Christmas to a chicken anyway?  Let's have a go into the chicken world:  Feet grip the perch all night.  Dark is turning to slate gray to light.  Hop down from safety and out into the open.  Flap, flap to the fluffy straw below.  Thirsty.  Shiver as the cold water goes down.  Fluff feathers to be warmer.  Tuck one foot up into warm belly feathers for a time. Warm foot down, cold foot up. Warm foot down, cold foot up.  Gobble some greens on the floor.  Swallow, swallow, swallow until the whole leave is down.  Eat pellets.  Oyster shells--peck them, eat them.  Scratch, peck and eat dirt on the floor.  Outside the coop, scratch, peck and eat bugs in the dirt.

Cardoons for Christmas Eve Dinner

All this is to say that a day in the life of a chicken is scratching, pecking, eating, preening from light in the morning until dark at night. Rather obviously they don't know Christmas from scratch.





One of the Things I get to do today, this Christmas Eve (their very first), is teach my chickens about Christmas.  From their point of view it looked like this: Dark things falling down on top of them. RUN!  Big greens on the ground.  ????  Quickly but cautiously inspecting the greens that fell out of the sky.  Food?  Peck, peck, peck.  Food!

So you might say that the hens don't and won't ever get it about Christmas.  But if it's about the spirit of giving, then maybe they know more than we think.  One of them left this for me yesterday.

Very first egg from any of these chickens--maybe from Latifah.