‘Tis the Season Bill Woods

'Tis the Season

By Bill Woods

If you are a Northerner, and particularly

if you and your horse reside beyond the confines of suburban curbs and sidewalks, some late weekend afternoon before Christmas you're apt to bundle up, braving the cold, to go Christmas caroling on horseback. Your harmonizing will be best received if the ground is frozen so the hordes don't punch deep hoof prints all over your audiences' yards . . . And if enough stirrup cup or Bloody Marys have been consumed to render anyone's inability to recognize what's being sung immaterial.

Wintertime on horseback can be a special time. Though not exactly at Christmas, I remember a lesson I taught years ago in Massachusetts that manifested this feeling: Eight o'clock in the evening, four "hobby riders" on school horses, and me on my event horse pressed into night-time duty. Not a typical "look up, stop pulling" indoor ring lesson but a ride through the fields, fresh with eight inches of virgin powder—every crystal glittering in the full moon's light, the bare branches casting long, sharp shadows—all framed by a blanket of stars. It was a vista worthy of Wenceslas and common to outdoors people but something memorable for my students from the city.

Christmas treats for horses . . . stockings stuffed with carrots and candy canes hung on stall fronts.

The fragrance of fresh hay in a snug, buttoned-up barnthat isout of the chill, and the sound of contented munching.

According to a Christian legend popular in Norway, at midnight in the first moment of Christmas Day the animals speak. It is a time of magic. For some of us fortunate ones, while it remains a marvel, it's not that unusual. If we know how to listen, our animals talk to us all the time.

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