If you’re on the schedule to be doing working this Christmas Eve, I can relate. In my growing up corner of Iowa, barely out of Missouri, and a half hour west of the Mississippi, we did farm work, what farmers always called “chores,” even on Christmas Eve.
When my parents first started farming, my dad had a second job, so at 8 years old I was responsible for taking care of the animals in the evenings. It was especially hard during short winter days. I can still feel the cold, dark evenings, my boots crunching through a crust on the snow, the wind cutting into my face and wire bucket handles digging into my fingers.
In my mind I can still walk the same path. I would bundle up and waddle like the Michelin man, out of our farm house, down through our lots, alongside our moon lit corn crib, climb the fence, and slip into our barn. It was cold and even scary outside, but, once I stepped in the barn it was a different world. You probably think of pigs as dirty, but in a farrowing house where sows are having little pigs there are clean rows of sows with litters of pigs the size of puppies. Each sow had a separate crate and the pigs would lay in little pink piles of ears and tails under their heat lamps.
Our pigs ate (and did other things) 365 days a year, so we did chores, even on Christmas Eve.
When I think about cold winter evenings and warm barns full of straw, watching over our flocks by night, and my very ordinary childhood and life, it means more that the Angel of the Lord appeared to shepherds and God wrote them into the Christmas story.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid (Luke 2:8-9
).
We still have plenty of ordinary jobs. Maybe you will be working this week when most people are home with their families: driving a semi, ringing up groceries, or mopping a floor. If so, savor the truth that God that wrote ordinary folks like us into the Christmas Story, “There were in those days shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks by night. . .” They were doing chores.
*Repeated from 12/24/2009.
