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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