The chickens are laying, the chickens are laying! Okay well one chicken is laying. Dennis went out to feed Wednesday morning and low and behold one small cream colored egg. Yes one egg from over 30 chickens.
A lot of people have asked about our slacker chickens and their free loading winter ways. A few things are going on with them. The young chickens are, well young. They, with the exception of one hen (the eggs from the younger chickens are smaller and get larger as they age so we know by the size this is from a young one) aren't quite mature enough to lay. The older chickens and probably even the younger ones are also being affected by the lack of daylight due to winter. The older ones have also recently molted, lost feathers and are growing new ones, which also happens near winter. Basically it's like they're saying, "its dark and cold and I need to get my hair did so by golly I'm not going to lay any eggs!" Annoying yes, but I can't say I really blame them.
At least one of them is back in the game though! So for the second day of December my true love gave to me ONE EGG! Now just at least four more and I can make a brown sugar pie!
So I'm going to go on a tangent here, regarding the 12 Days of Christmas song, yes there's a tie in. I was joking that song and this egg Wednesday morning at work and ended up in a discussion about why 12 days of Christmas? So I decided to look it up, here's what I found:
"The 12 Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day and last until the evening of the 5th January - also known as Twelfth Night. The 12 Days have been celebrated in Europe since before the middle ages and were a time of celebration.
The 12 Days each traditionally celebrate a feast day for a saint and/or have different celebrations."
Source : http://www.whychristmas.com/customs/12daysofchristmas.shtml
I kind of figured that it had something to do with Saints. I didn't realize though that they come after the actual day of Christmas. We've been going about this celebration thing all wrong. We're missing out on almost two extra weeks of partying!
So anyways, today you may or may not have learned about the egg laying habits of chickens and Christmas tradition origins. You also may have already known this. Either way, happy Thursday! Here's hoping my true love brings me a few more eggs in preparation for all that extra celebrating we need to do.
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