Shadowplay is my favorite photographer on Flickr!

John Lienhard, University of Houston. So listen to the animals tonight. Find your irrational creative core -- find hope that passes reason. Find a way to disarm your own enmities. And let hope disarm the rational limitations that've bound you -- for the last 364 days.

Do the animals talk on Christmas Eve? Do they talk about the coming of Christ? About the baby Jesus? As a girl, I used to head down to our big red barn in Ohio and sit on a bucket, waiting. Hoping it was true.

Our orange tabby cat Tangerine would sashay down from the hay loft to keep me company, looking up at me, eyes half-slits, purring mightily, enjoying my surprise midnight visit, but not a single word came out of his mouth, even if it was curved in an enigmatic feline smile that led me to believe that he just might. Maybe. Purrrrrhaps. If I just waited a little longer. And then my mom would come through the door, wrapped in her pink robe with her snow boots on, and ask me what in the heck I was doing and tell me to get back in bed right this instant before I caught my death of cold.

My buckskin quarterhorse enjoyed the hard Christmas candies I fed him. As did Pearl the goat. Heidi the German Shepard was partial to them as well. Their crunch crunch crunch as the ate their treats was the only sound in the otherwise silent barn.

This year, my money's on the geese.