Does She Like Animals? And Do Animals Like Her?

Christmas Eve. It rained all night and all morning. The sound was the best thing I've slept to since our first night on Kauai, at the Sealodge in Princeville, where we opened the window and heard the pounding of the surf in the dark, a couple hundred feet below at the bottom of the cliff.

When the rains stopped today I walked over to get the mail, finding a Christmas card from my cousin in Florida, and a stack of solicitations for charity donations, as well a key to a package in one of the lockers.

This morning while we wrapped presents for each other, and for Ginger's folks, and her niece, whom we will see tomorrow in Mesa, Ginger turned on the television to EWTN, watching a scratchy old movie about the nativity, followed the live feed provided by the Vatican News Service of the evening mass from St. Peters. I noticed that the prayers were in Latin. It was the new mass in Latin. Many folks wouldn't know what a strange thing this was. to see at this moment in Church history.

We are watching Christmas in Connecticut for the second time in three days. I was reluctant to watch it again so soon after the last time, but it was on TCM again, and there was nothing else on. Two nights I had called out a hundred new things I noticed about the movie, and the intricacies of the story and the characters. I thought there was nothing left to say. Already I have noticed a dozen new things this time. Among them I noticed that the cow's real name was not Mecushla. That's the name that Dennis Morgan's character bestows on it, based on what he thinks is the name of the fictional cow in Elizabeth Lane's magazine columns about her fictional farm. At least I think that's the case. But as soon as he says it, the cow becomes Mecushla. He names it. It's very Adam-like energy, from Genesis. The man names the animals.

There is much animal energy in the movie. During their romantic interlude walking the cow together, this furnishes the qualifying questions that Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan exchange with each, in their courtship. Does she like animals? And do animals like her?

Felix (S.Z. Sakall)  is the cow .They become one. Likewise the judge and the horse (the pulls the carriage) are one. The cow and the horse both act spontaneously in the story to move the two lovers towards matrimony. The cow gives them their romantic interlude. The horse takes them into the hands of the State, which will provide them the legal bond required by matrimony and society. That the romantic interlude was quasi-illicit (because Stanwyck's character is posing as a married woman) means that the corresponding interaction with the State finds them in jail. But the judge whom they face is friendly, and marries them instead. Such is the lightness of their punishment, because Stanwyck was not really married after all, and thus besides the rhetoric she expresses (all but endorsing flirting by married woman), she did nothing wrong. Neither did he.