8th Day of Christmas

ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME, eight maids a' milking.

I remember when I was in junior high school, my sister was a cheerleader. Her cheer team would band together and once a year, they would make tamales for the community as a fund raiser. Hundreds of tamales. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They would start in the wee hours of the morning, say 6:30, and work until 6:30 that night. Take it from me, it was the most horrifying process as women covered in flour would saunter out of the kitchen, their eyes turned demon-red from the hot chilis they were working with and their hair rising on end as the bun in their hair sagged down by their shoulders. It was one of the most unpleasant of memories in my childhood, one that will come up later in therapy. So when I hear eight maids were milking hundreds of cows, I laugh, because it reminds me of the scary, downturned faces of the women in that group.

The irony here is that the eighth day stands for the beatitudes, which are kind and holy attitudes which Christians were called to live by. Under normal conditions, eight ladies pulling on the udders of cows for hours on end would not only make them extremely cranky, it is kinda creepy to me. Who on earth looked at a cow and said, "You know, I think I'm going to suck on that thing and drink whatever comes out. There's no way it would taste totally nasty." I bet one guy looked at the wrong cow and thought he was drinking sour milk. I got news for that guy- it wasn't sour milk and it wasn't an udder and that cow had horns. Oops. Point is, there is only so much milking a maid can do before a maid goes mad- do the math.

The beatitudes are a call for us to live upright lives in the eyes of the Lord, to rise above carnal, evil desires and show God's love practically. But we don't always fulfill that call. I know that where I work, things can get a tad bit hairy and as a result, I get a tad bit cranky. I become agitated and irritated. I look nothing like the beatitudes found in Matthew 5:3-10. But these maids seem to like their job despite the cons of the job. They do it every day and they do it with joy. So maybe the eighth day is a call that we love what we do, no matter what we do, even if it isn't a fun job. The eighth day is about work.

KB