Day 50: Crows and Baubles

Christmas Eve.  A bottle of beer, a bowl of pistachio nuts and 'The Chronicles of Narnia' on television.  Magical wardrobes, Turkish delight and Mr Tumnus.  My sister had a wardrobe in her room - mahogany, imposing, pillared.  I used to sneak into her room and open the door carefully, ever hopeful of fur coats and snow.  The boundaries between fantasy and reality were very blurred for me.  I truly believed that on Christmas Eve at midnight all animals were able to speak.  But the logical side of me needed proof, so I stalked the cat for several Eves on the trot.  But she always gave me the slip, or I flaked out before the witching hour.  Don't remember where I picked up that myth.  I think it's Norwegian or Swedish.  A quick internet search has revealed many results, including one titled 'Animals Talk on Christmas Eve - Fact or Fiction?'  Seems like I'm not the only one with blurred boundaries... 

Childhood Christmas Eves were always a strange mixture of the beautiful and the macabre.  The beautiful - in the form of the Christmas tree.  My father didn't let a tree in the house until December 24th, and I found the scent of the pine needles and the lustre of the antique glass baubles completely bewitching.   The smoky blue one was a favourite.  (And still exists - a Proustian madeleine of a bauble.)  Holly, mistletoe and ivy, cut fresh and smelling of bitter green.

Macabre - in the form of the turkey giblets.  A heart!  Liver!  Gizzard!  Neck! And in the annual ritual of cutting down the dead crows in the cherry orchard.  (I realise that this last is not a standard practice for most families.  Bear with me.)  Crows are very bright and very cherry-greedy.  They will strip an orchard bare incredibly quickly.  One way to stop them is to kill a couple and string them up (medieval but effective).  They serve as a brutal warning to the others, who are intelligent enough to give the orchard a wide berth.  This doesn't work with any other stupider cherry-thieves (blackbirds, starlings etc).  The crow gibbet would serve its grisly purpose throughout the cherry harvest and then slowly decompose over the autumn.  It held a horrible pull for me - terrifying but compelling.  I would walk past, eyes front, but hyper-aware of it.  A sickly pulse in my visual field.  By Christmas Eve, all that was left were tatty bundles of feather and bone, like voodoo fetishes.  They hit a jarring note for my mother, against the seasonal harmony of peace and good will.  So she would cut them down, and I was safe from the horror until the summer brought a fresh batch of corpses.  Festive times!

The tension of beauty and ugliness, life and death.  The facts behind any fiction.