The Twelve Days of Christmas: 3
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: three French hens.
We named the hens Faith, Hope and Love, in honour of the God-fearing farmer who had supplied them to us. They were to be our small contribution towards living a life of self-sufficiency. We hastily fenced off a corner of our garden to provide an enclosure for our clucking trio, and waited eagerly for our first fresh eggs to appear.
The first hen to go was Faith. The hole in the fence showed where the fox had got in and dragged away its feathery prize. My true love found the only egg that Faith had managed to lay in her short time with us, but we didn’t have the heart to take it. The two of us repaired the hole in the fence in silence. We’d never mourned a hen before.
The fox got Love next. He didn’t manage to remove his prey on this occasion, so as I drew back the curtains on another frosty morning, the twisted body of a hen lying in a pool of blood and feathers was the first sight that greeted me. We buried her where she had fallen.
“All we’ve got left now is Hope,” said my true love, quietly.
Our last remaining hen was brought into the house, where we thought she would be much safer, and she took over incubating the eggs laid by her two companions. That was the end of our self-sufficiency experiment, because we couldn’t bring ourselves to take any of Hope’s eggs.
For the next year, all our friends and family will be getting chicks as birthday presents. We can’t do much about Love and Faith, but at least we can share a little Hope.
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