“Listen, young ones, for I, Hanekh, am a very old camel, and may not be alive to tell this tale much longer. Listen, and remember. If I leave nothing else behind but a spotty hide and yellow bones, I wish to leave this.”
Only 8 more days until Christmas! Please allow me to introduce (again) my Christmas fable about the camels that brought the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. It’s a short story with a deep history: I wrote it when I was 13 as an eighth grade English assignment, in the runup to Christmas 1965. A few years later I decided to give it to my mother as a Christmas present for Christmas 1972. Problem was, I had lost the handwritten grade school manuscript, so I just sat down and rewrote it from memory. I gave Mother the typed manuscript in a duo-tang binder. She read it, wiped the tears from her eyes, and then kept it in her dresser for literally the rest of her life. My sister and I found it after Mother died in 2000. I took the story home, where it sat in a box for 22 years. In the fall of 2022 I pulled it out, OCRed it to a text file, and then did a certain amount of editing and polishing before uploading it to the Kindle store.
The story is a fable because animals are the primary characters. Two of the Magi’s camels ache for very different things. Then there is Hanekh, who is unlike most camels in that he tries to make sense of the world around him, a world shaped and ruled by human beings. He asks the Christ Child a question, hence the title. All three camels receive what they desire, but Hanekh—
—Well, read the story. It’s only 99c. And keep a Kleenex handy. Or wear long sleeves. It’s not a sad story, but a story of triumph, of both God and God’s creation, camels included. I’ve written a number of stories of triumph and affirmation. This may well be my favorite.
