Christmas Poetry

Brown-and-White Christmas

“We don’t have our Christmas ‘til the cows have theirs.”

That’s what Dad always said.

On Christmas Eve, we’d finish the milking,

Clean up the barn,

Feed the stock.

Oats and alfalfa, corn and cottonseed,

Molasses and minerals: a family tradition.

My brother, cutting twine off bales of hay,

I, tossing the feed into the manger,

Dad, carrying buckets of grain,

The Jerseys cows, eager to partake.

Sometimes with a rock, sometimes with my frozen hands,

I had to smash the ice in the water troughs,

Allowing the cows to drink;

It hurt,

Even bloodied my knuckles.

Sneezing,

We broke bales of yellow straw,

Laying them out in the frozen corrals and sheds,

Bedding the cows down on Christmas night.

They, always curious and always cautious,

Like shepherds approaching an infant’s crib,

Sniffed the dusty piles and tossed it around;

They shrugged off suspicion and finally laid down.

We saw to all the calves, 

Placing heat lamps in their pens,

And straw bales

To swaddle their hutches

To block the cold;

They whined, of course, to be scratched,

They sucked on my fingers, wanting more to eat,

Looking at me with their brown eyes

Shining like stars, sparkling like tinsel;

And moist noses nuzzling my hand said

“Thank you for my warm bed. Now, where’s my bottle?”

When we finished caring for our brown-and-whites babies,

We shuffled back to the house, Dad, me, and my siblings;

Frozen in our black rubber boots, shivering in our woolen socks.

Mom thawed us out with cocoa and chowder.