This Christmas, unlike the last fifteen, I won’t be reading Stubby Pringle’s Christmas by Jack Schaeffer to my grandkids, all sitting around the living room of the home place.

The pandemic has taken that away from us.

We are still alive, and some have had the virus and are in the recovery phase. But there won’t be any getting together.

This is happening all over ranch country to one degree or another.

So this will be a very different kind of holiday.

Those of us who live on ranches are more or less used to the solitude, so it’s not really a new feeling. And, we do interact, like last night when we delivered homemade bread, hamburger from our fed out steer, and gifts, then waved from the pick up as we left to the chorus of young voices who had come to the front door of my son’s house.

Maybe this holiday season will be one of reflection as we think about how fortunate we’ve been in these past years.

Our parents and grandparents lived through wars, plagues, and depressions.

The bad times may just hollow out a bigger place for the good times to fill with joy when they return.

Buenos días! Happy Guadalupe day!

Today, 12 December is celebrated in Mexico and the southwestern United States as “El día de la Virgin de Guadalupe”. It commemorates a miracle that occurred during the early days of Mexico when the Native Americans were being conquered by the Spanish explorers.

The Spanish were Catholic, while the Indians were primarily agricultural and pagan. This was the source of a clash of cultures, as the Indians worshipped the Earth Mother.

The legend of Guadalupe is of a young Indian boy named Juan Diego who told the priest of the pueblo named Tepeyac, that a woman he met on the way to town had instructed him to have the church built there.

The priest scoffed.

The next day the boy encountered the woman again. She told him to gather flowers from the mountain. Being December he was doubtful, but to his amazement, found the flowers, roses, and gathered them in his Tilma, a simple overgarment of a reed-like cloth.

He carried the roses to the priest, telling him that the woman had black hair and brown skin and looked Middle Eastern.

When The priest opened the cloak he saw the roses and also the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, imprinted on the inside.

The Priest built the church. He declared it a miracle. Since then, that has become the site of the Basilica of Mexico City.

Guadalupe, Spain, is a town southwest of Madrid in the Extremadura where the conquistador Hernando Cortes was born. It was the location in the 1300s of another miracle.

A humble vaquero named Gíl Cordero was in the mountains searching for a lost cow, when a woman appeared to him. She explained that she was the Virgin Mary, and that near there was a statue of herself, which had been buried there to hide it from the Muslims.

The statue was found and was installed in the church in Guadalupe, and has been celebrated as a miracle since then.  

     When Juan Diego, another peasant, met the woman in the mountains, she told him that she was the same woman as the one who had appeared to Gíl Cordero in Guadalupe, Spain.

     This connection between the maternal principle of Christianity and the Earth Mother of the native Americans served to bring these two cultures together and bring about spiritual unification in the New World. 

This morning the sun rose while the nearly full moon still hung in the western sky. I have to believe that ancient druids held some magical belief about this event.

Today being the first day of December, the last month of 2020, the pandemic year, maybe the universe is echoing the confrontation of man versus virus.

In any event, my imagination runs to a scene of a druid standing on a hilltop, or a Comanche medicine man atop Medicine Mound near the Red river.

Each would be experiencing this clash of the Titans from on high, as the sun and moon looked into one another’s face, and concluding that they had been part of something supernatural!

With our “advanced“ knowledge of gravitational forces and of the effects of sunspots on earth, who knows but what this juxtaposition might actually be a force to cause things to happen on Earth.

My choice would be that it would chasten all humans to want to lay aside their differences, and see their oneness.

Also that mother cows will be jarred into being charitable toward cowboys trying to ear-tag their newborn calves.

And, cold-backed young horses who really want to uncork on frosty mornings would suddenly develop warm fuzzy feelings for their bronc stomping colt starters.

Probably what will really happen is that I’ll be the only person on earth watching the event,

and standing barefoot on the hoary grass I’ll get the first case of frostbite of the year!

I guess our Indian summer is about to grind to a halt. The weather guesser tells us we’re gonna have temps in the twenties in a couple days.

This is the weather in Texas: one day summer, the next day winter. You never know what to wear.

The cowboys, who live mostly outside have a whole language about this weather. 

     “Whooee! Nothin’ between us an’ the North Pole but a bob wire fence!”

     “ Even that’s only a three wire fence!”

     “ Yeah, and one’s broke down.”

     “Heck, it’s colder’n a pawnbrokers smile.”

     “ Feels cold as a well digger’s…belt buckle.”

I guess me and miz Sallie will be movin’ the Hibiscus into the greenhouse, and I’ll be pullin’ up tomato vines and hangin’em up in the tractor shed.

So, cut me a slice of that chuck wagon coffee while I pull on my Mukluks, I gotta go feed cows!