My great-grandmother, Ella Nora Dennig, was a first generation German American, a strong-willed woman reared with an ironclad Teutonic sense of order. Family lore has her winning a local beauty pageant before taking a job as housekeeper for the George Lawrence family. That’s when George’s son W.R. met, courted, and married the 19-year-old Ella Nora, moving her into an imposing home of her own in October of 1887.
Our great-grandmother had Rules, with a capital “R.” Rule One, implemented after she’d borne five sons, was “No maids.” The former housekeeper would tend her own home, thank you very much, ironically brooking no hires that might result in one of her boys marrying “beneath his station.”
When the Kaiser’s War exploded across Europe, sharp skirmishes were fought at Ella Nora’s dinner table. Her standard opening salvo would be, “Germany’s got a right to a seaport.”
W.R., one generation removed from the fens of Lincolnshire, England, would thunder, “Germany ain’t got a right to nothin’!” Dishes flew, doors slammed, and the sprawling white farmhouse with the wraparound porch fairly shuddered with its own brand of trench warfare.
All that changed in 1917, when Ella Nora’s second son, Victor Dale, mustered in to the United States Army.
“That stopped the fights at home,” recalled my Grandpa Ferdinand. “No more Germans, no more Englishmen. We were all Americans after that.”
Ferdinand, short, stout, and named for a martyred archduke, looked much more like the Dennigs than the tall slender Lawrences. As Ella Nora’s pet, Grandpa apparently came in for more than his share of the dark, palm-sized nutmeg and raison cookies his mother kept in a lard can behind the stove. Ferdinand’s grandchildren would know those treats as “Ferdie Cookies,” as big a part of our holiday tradition as those special Christmas Eve chores.
You see, Ella Nora’s sons, grandsons, and great-grandchildren were raised in her German belief that farm animals gained the power of speech, midnight Christmas Eve, spiritual inheritance from livestock that once stood witness in a ramshackle Bethlehem stable.
But that wondrous phenomenon carried a dark caveat. Curious humans who might see or hear the animals speaking would be struck dead.
Merry Christmas.
Needless to say, none of Ella Nora’s children was permitted to visit the barn close to the midnight hour on December the 24th. She did insist, however, that her family take extra steps to make certain that when the animals did speak, they had only nice things to say about the people charged with their care.
To that end, each Christmas Eve, Grandpa Ferdinand, along with my sister, brother, and me, visited every pen that held our Holstein cattle, forking and fluffing deep spreads of our prettiest, summer-gold straw. Next, we’d climb the crooked hayloft stairs to sort choice bales of brome, timothy and orchard grass. Grandpa would cut the strings with his Case pocketknife, then stand back and laugh, watching us kids the kick broken bales down hay ports into wooden mangers W.R. himself had nailed together a half century before. The manger uprights were worn silvery smooth by the necks of hundreds of cattle and horses reaching for fodder through the stanchions, through the decades.
From stall to stall we’d potter, making our gifts to the animals that gave us our livelihood the year ‘round. Then, as huffs of cattle breath rose white in the winter air, Grandpa would tell stories.
My favorites were about the ghost-gray Percherons W.R. imported from France, the ones that once upon a time stood patiently along these same feed bunks. Behind Grandpa’s voice, I could almost hear heavy hooves stamping against the cold, counterpoint to low, rumbling nickers when the feed bucket came by. The horses in Grandpa's stories weren't all Percherons, but they all carried regal names: Clayta and Mabel C, Voltaire, Prince Imperial, and Indiana Commander.
A single strap of sleigh bells hung year ‘round inside the milk house door, nailed there so we could hear visitors over the hum and pulse of milking machines. Late on Christmas Eve, those bells carried greater import, signaling that Dad had finally finished scouring the equipment and was taking a big pan of warm milk to the swarm of cats living in the calf barn.
Tails flicking, hungry cats ringed that steaming pan while my father checked the long gate by the main barn, switched on the big pole light, and joined us for the walk home to my grandparents' house, their Christmas tree glimmering behind the living room window.
What I remember most about those walks home is how quiet the nights always were. I recall, too, the black shapes of maple trees that marked the highway’s edge, trees W.R. had planted before he and Ella Nora were married, trees that had watched five generations of Lawrences, redolent of cattle, walk their children home under star-pocked, “Silent Night” skies.
There is a high school now where those barns once stood. The enormous rock that W.R. nearly lost his life trying to clear from his cropland is a “spirit stone” decorated by cheerleaders and graffiti artists. Many of the maple trees remain, but only my brother and his wife are left on the land that came with a sheepskin deed signed by Andrew Jackson. They live in the house Ferdinand built for Grandmother Helen, and at Christmas, my brother and sister-in-law's decorated tree still shines through their living room window.
My parents, along with my sister and me, live two hours to the southeast, our farm set in rolling hills that are nothing like the glacial plains of home, let alone the River Withim Valley in Lincolnshire or the Black Forest edges near Ella Nora’s ancestral home.
But this coming Christmas Eve, tradition will again forge a connection. My sister’s miniature horses will barely be able to walk through their thick holiday bedding. The big horses, snorty Peruvians and a scatterwit Tennessee Walker, will munch oat treats the color of Ferdie Cookies, their hay ring crammed with the best big round bales we kept back for winter.
Our white cattle range on the steep hill behind the barn. But on Christmas Eve, they’ll come down for sweet feed they don’t need, ditto three three flakes of timothy, brome, and orchard grass hay because…well… “because Ella Nora.”
The forecast is for snow. If that comes true, we'll not see the thin crescent moon, nor stars scattershot across the night's canopy. But snowfall will muffle dwindling highway traffic and decorate the tall pines that palisade behind my parents' house. We'll make boot tracks through wet snow, reminded all over again that "home" is just another place name for "heart."
When I hear Christmas choirs sing of cattle lowing or ox and lamb keeping time to a child's drum beat, I can close my eyes and go home to hoar-frosted farmyards, conjuring up the sounds and smells we were raised to believe greeted Him into this world. And should the animals talk on the midnight hour, maybe, just maybe, they will be kind.
(Portions of this post first appeared in the November/December, 1994, issue of The Pointing Dog Journal)