1. Having a Cow
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pageant
by D. G. D. Davidson
I. Having a Cow
“Mister Andrews,” said Bishop Van de Velde to me as he elbowed his way into his seat at the crowded breakfast table, “you are going to host a Christmas pageant for the ponies.”
My coffee hadn’t kicked in yet. I stared at him across my cereal and tried, in spite of the early-morning sluggishness of my mind, to parse the words that His Excellency had just spoken in his thick Belgian accent.
“I’m going to what now?”
“A pageant. A Christmas pageant. I expect you to organize it.” He glanced at his watch. “You have a week.”
I carefully lowered my spoonful of milk and mush, which had begun trembling. “And why me, exactly—?”
“Because I notice you are getting along well with some of the ponies.”
“Ah—”
“And you seem to have a lot of free time.”
“Ah—”
“See what you can do to incorporate the local customs, would you? Talk to that pony friend of yours, what’s her name—?”
“Lyra Heartstrings.”
“Yes, quite.”
“But she’s not a convert.”
“All the better.” And just like that, he dug into his plate of eggs and toast.
I gazed for a moment at his skullcap, which floated in the midst of his mass of unruly white hair like a tiny desert island in a storm-whipped sea. “Why don’t you ask Sire August? Since he is a pony—”
To silence me, the bishop raised one hand, which still gripped an egg-stained fork. “Mister Andrews”—the added emphasis on the mister meant trouble—“I would not assign you such a task if I did not have full confidence that you could complete it. You can consider this a lesson in the spiritual discipline of obedience.”
There it was: he had played the obedience card, and thus my hands were tied. “Ah, dammit. Er, darn it. Er, I mean, yes, Your Excellency, of course. I will get on that right away.”
He bestowed upon me a warm smile and once again set forth to demolish his breakfast.
To make a long story short, I was a seminarian, a student training to be a Catholic priest, and I was currently in the middle of a yearlong immersion program in the newly established Diocese of Canterlot. Because the ponies spoke a language strikingly like American English, the Church had hand-picked purportedly promising American seminarians for this job, and someone, probably as a result of temporary insanity, had picked me. The idea was that, if I didn’t go crazy after a year here, I must be fit to be a priest for ponies and would thenceforth get stuck in some fledgling church in a remote equine village where I would in all likelihood never see another human being for the rest of my life. It was good times.
A few hours after my morning conversation with the bishop, I skipped class and made my way up and down innumerable stairs in Canterlot’s low-class, low-rent north end, The Crags. The Crags were a maze of winding paths and narrow staircases linking together an endless series of stilt-propped brownstones that looked ready to tumble from the cliff. Now that the pegasus ponies had unleashed the full brunt of winter on Equestria, these passageways were especially hazardous, coated as they were with slush and ice.
To arm myself against the cold, I had replaced my usual biretta with a felt fedora, added a cloak to my woolen winter cassock, and wrapped a red scarf about my throat. Tall, gangly, and dressed head-to-toe in black, I’ve little doubt that I presented an intimidating figure to all the four-legged creatures I met; a few cows, donkeys, and ponies indicated as much when they scurried out of my path upon glimpsing me staggering down the shadowed and snow-coated alleyways.
At last, after a few false turns and dead-ends, I made my way to a complex called the Dales, climbed a rickety external wooden staircase to the fifth floor, and pounded on door 502.
I could hear the melancholy strains of a harp wafting from inside. They continued for a minute more after my knock, but then came the alternating clop-squeak of hooves against floorboards. The door flew open and enveloped me in warm air that smelled of freshly baked bread and stable leavings.
I swept the fedora from my head and bowed at the waist. “Milady.”
Lyra Heartstrings, looking shaggy in her winter coat, leaned against the doorframe and sighed. “Oh, it’s you, Jack. I thought so. Don’t you have class?”
“I’m ditching.”
“Can you afford it?”
“Princess Twilight will be angry at me for skipping her lecture on Equestrian history, but the wrath of the princess is both quick to rise and quick to dissipate. I have learned to take advantage of that.”
“I’m practicing for a recital, I’ll have you know.” She harrumphed and tipped her nose into the air, but I could tell the stuffiness was feigned.
“Ah,” I said, moving into the doorway, “but I am a missionary, which means I am here to lure you over to my way of thinking and my way of doing things, and that includes all my faults and vices, such as procrastination.”
She shook her head, but I could see a smile creeping its way onto her mouth, and she finally burst into a giggle. “Oh, fine. Come here.”
Many years ago, childhood trauma had bestowed upon me a fear of large animals; it was hard to believe that, seven months prior, the prospect of walking around a world full of ponies had frightened me nearly out of my wits, but now I was comfortable here, and I owed that mostly to the kindhearted mare standing in front of me. I had even picked up a few of the ponies’ cultural niceties, which I had come to think of as normal, so when Lyra raised her head toward me, I without hesitation bent down, and we sniffed each other’s faces.
“Cereal for breakfast again?” she asked. She enjoyed showing off her superior sense of smell with comments like that. To me, she always smelled the same—like a cross between a horse and crème de menthe.
“Mm hm. I’m trying to eat healthy.” I straightened and planted my hat on my head. “Are you free? I’d like to go out. We need to talk about a pageant.”
She huffed. “I should practice . . . oh, but Canterlot is so pretty this time of year.”
That meant I had her. She galloped back into the apartment and reappeared shortly with her neck enwrapped in a woolen scarf striped red and white like a candy cane. With her green coat, it made her look like a life-sized Christmas ornament. “Where are we going?”
“How about our usual byre?” I asked, and her face brightened.
Canterlot bustled all year long, but now it bustled with extra vigor. We strolled through the commercial district, where every shop was decked with lights, holly, and evergreen boughs. All the stores had tinsel-covered trees in their windows, and the many sweet shops displayed gingerbread villages, some complete with electric train sets or ice-skating rinks. All the ponies wore hats and scarves. A few had fuzzy winter coats, but most of Canterlot’s elite had clipped their fur and now shivered from the cold. Other animals were also out in numbers: cows lowed as they processed slowly down the roads with their heavy udders waving from side to side, and centaurs and minotaurs pushed aside lesser creatures as they made their way up and down the streets like great ships cutting through ice floes. The tourist season was long past, so I spotted only a few humans in the midst of the crowd. Over everything floated the savory scent of wintertime treats baking in the shops’ many ovens.
What still amazed me about the city was what I didn’t hear: I didn’t hear the roar of a motor, the honk of a horn, or the exasperated cursing of a driver. As packed as the streets were, Lyra and I could talk without raising our voices; and because this was Equestria, even in the closest press I didn’t worry about having my pocket picked.
More than once, we passed a pony or other creature, surrounded by a knot of onlookers, shouting from a soapbox. The ponies had no modern forms of mass communication, and they still regarded film reels and telegrams as novelties, so street preaching remained a popular way to broadcast philosophical or political ideas. Princess Celestia looked on human activity with suspicion—I, and most of the other missionaries, had been at least once to Canterlot Castle for “tea,” that is, a severe grilling—but she usually left the ponies to their own devices when it came to the press and public speech.
In fact, somewhere in this market district would be a soapbox with a Roman Catholic, usually but not always a pony convert, mounted on it. With permission from the castle, I had even manned that soapbox myself from time to time, but today I wanted to give it a wide berth, lest I be spotted and word get back to the bishop that I was absent from class. Word would get back to the bishop anyway, but I didn’t want it to get back now.
“Explain this pageant of yours to me,” said Lyra.
I lifted my hat and rubbed my forehead. “Ah, yes. Our dear bishop, you see, is always getting funny ideas. As it happens, your Hearth’s Warming Eve shares a day with our Christmas, and, as usual, there is a strange correspondence between our two worlds, so the holidays not only have the same date, but look superficially similar: in fact, all of Canterlot right now resembles a strip mall dressed up for the season.”
“What’s a strip mall?”
“An evil institution of which ponies should remain ignorant. Suffice to say, because the two holidays fall on the same day, the bishop has given me the unenviable task of melding them together, of producing perfect harmony—”
Lyra stopped for a moment to gaze into the window of a bakery. As she examined a rack of pumpkin pies, she said, “But if you already have a holiday on that day, why don’t you just do whatever you usually do? Nopony’s going to stop you.”
“We will, but you don’t quite understand the dilemma. See, if you celebrated Hearth’s Warming Eve by ripping open pregnant mothers or something like that, we would of course try to replace your nasty holiday with our more innocent one, but since it’s simply your founders’ day, we don’t have any business messing with it or telling our converts not to participate.”
She scowled sidelong at me and continued up the street. “You can be really gross sometimes, Jack.”
“Yes . . . sorry.” I jogged to catch up with her. “My point is, you can’t move your holiday, and we can’t move ours, so I have to find some way for the two to get along like old friends. We have to figure out how to have two holidays on one day.”
“Hm.” She paused in the middle of the street and tapped her chin. “Can’t you just celebrate one and then celebrate the other? Can’t you just go to a Hearth’s Warming Eve play and then after that do whatever it is you guys do?”
I tugged at my scarf. “That would be sensible, but the bishop is not sensible. He wants things ‘blended.’ He thinks that’s ‘enriching.’ This isn’t the worst of his ideas, admittedly; at the very least, it will produce less fallout than his attempt to canonize Bucephalus and Trigger. And let’s not forget the pony crucifix debacle.”
Lyra shuddered.
While Lyra described for me a typical Hearth’s Warming Eve celebration, we made our way to Canterlot’s east end and hiked a steep but well-maintained trail up to Byre Pierre, our favorite hangout. Nestled in one of the many small, fertile valleys that glaciers had ages ago scooped from the mountainside above Canterlot, the byre consisted of a small, cozy shop, a patio with outdoor tables, and a long, low barn containing several spacious stalls for the cows.
Ponies were avid milk drinkers, and they could talk about milk the way a man from Earth might talk about fine wine, so these byres, or cow barns, stood all over Equestria to cater to the ponies’ insatiable appetite for dairy products. The cows who lived in them often practiced rigorous diets and exercise routines to ensure that their milk had a certain flavor; in fact, the most coveted milk in all of Equestria, White Lightning, originated in the very byre toward which Lyra and I now climbed, where it sold for fifty bits per glass. It came from a mysterious and reclusive cow named Bossy, who, according to rumor, created its curious aroma and succulent flavor by eating nothing but sweet potatoes and habanero peppers.
Normally, Lyra and I liked to sit outside, but the weather no longer permitted, so we pushed our way into the warm shop, which smelled of sweet cream and cheese. The interior was cramped, and decorating every patch of wall or spot of counter were brackets holding fine china. The western wall of the shop was glass, so we had a wonderful view of the spires of Canterlot sprawling below. It was still beautiful even though the sky overhead was slate gray and the banners on the spires hung slack.
Lyra and I moved to a wrought-iron corner table, where I began divesting myself of my winter gear. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said as I pulled off my scarf. “See, we’ll have a Christmas play that starts off as usual, but then halfway through there’s a twist: it turns out that Smart Cookie, Pansy, and Clover are the same as the three wise men—”
I was interrupted when the bull in this china shop, Pierre himself, arrived with our menus. He was enormous, with a gold ring in his nose, dark brown fur, and long horns that protruded three feet from either side of his head. He hailed from Prance, one of Equestria’s innumerable vassal states, and he was also a louche fellow, at least by fastidious pony standards.
“Oh ho ho ho,” Pierre said with a wink as he slid the milk list in front of us, “if it is not my favorite mismatched lovebirds. And how are you today, monsieur and mademoiselle?”
“We’re just friends,” said Lyra.
“And I’m studying to be a priest,” I added.
Pierre ducked his great head low so that the curve of his horns enclosed our shoulders, and he stage-whispered, “Ah, but Lulu claims she has seen zuh two of you playing zuh hoofsie under zuh table, no? Oh ho ho ho!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, but I said, “The tip gets smaller with every comment, Pierre.”
He quickly lifted his head and snorted. “Ah, zuh customer is always right! Lulu must be mistaken. And what can I get zuh two of you zis morning? We have ice cream, malts, and cheese year round of course, but right now, zuh mint hot cocoa is most populaire. We make it with zuh sweetest milk and top it with zuh beaten heavy cream.” He lifted a hoof to his mouth and kissed it. “Ah! Magnifique!”
“Start us with a couple of samplers,” I said, “and we’ll move from there.”
“Oui, monsieur.” Pierre gave Lyra another wink and walked away. As he turned, he nearly cold-cocked me with one of his horns, but I ducked in time.
After he left, I looked over the milk list. Beside each milk was a picture of the cow who produced it, and under each picture was a short biography followed by a taster’s note. My eye fell upon the milk of Clarabelle, whose note read, “A full, heady drink with a light hint of strawberry and chestnut, with a chocolaty finish.”
Above that, I was unsurprised to read, “Clarabelle is a Jersey cow who enjoys snacking on strawberries, chestnuts, and chocolate.”
“You know,” I mused as I perused the list, “I’m suddenly in the mood for eggnog. ’Tis the season, after all. Do you think they have any?”
Lyra stared blankly across the table at me. “Egg what?”
“You’re kidding. You have candy canes, gingerbread houses, even Christmas trees—”
“You mean Hearth’s Warming trees?”
“Whatever. I mean you have all the superficial trappings of a commercialized American Christmas, so surely you have eggnog. You cannot have Christmas without eggnog.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“This is impossible. Pierre!” I thumped the table with my fist, and Lyra jumped.
Pierre, with frightening speed, appeared at our table with two wooden racks of miniature milk glasses hanging from the ends of his long horns. Lyra and I each took a rack and set it on the table. Lyra immediately started savoring the milk, but I scooted my chair closer to Pierre and said, “Please tell me you have eggnog.”
He replied with a deep frown. “Egg what, monsieur?”
“You have cream, ice cream, butter, cheese, milkshakes, and even hot cocoa, but you dare to tell me you have no eggnog?”
With his big brow deeply furrowed, he slowly shook his massive head, and I again had to duck one of his horns. “We serve milk, not eggs, monsieur. Perhaps—”
I slammed my fist on the table again, making the milk samples rattle.
“Jack!” Lyra hissed, but I ignored her.
“This is blasphemy!” I cried. “Heresy! As a future priest, or actually as a guy who’s one more disciplinary action away from getting kicked out of the seminary, I cannot bear to witness this kind of lewdness amongst the infidels!”
Pierre looked genuinely frightened. “If monsieur will calm down, perhaps I could—”
Lyra paused in her milk consumption long enough to glare at me and say, “He’s joking, Pierre.”
“Pierre.” I leaned on one of his horns and whispered confidentially into his ear. “What would you say if I told you I could introduce you to a milk drink from my world—a thick, sweet, delicious milk drink—which we consider an excellent beverage for exactly this time of year?”
A grin spread across Pierre’s muzzle, and I could almost see little dollar signs appearing in his widening eyes. “Ah, monsieur! If it is as you say, zuh ponies would line up for miles to taste zis unique drink, no? Oh ho ho ho!”
“Ho ho ho indeed, Pierre.” I gave his neck a friendly slap and turned to Lyra, who had already drunk half her rack of milk samples, and whose upper lip now sported a creamy band of white. “Lyra, are you any good in a kitchen?”
She hiccoughed. “Fair.”
“Great, because I’m lousy. Come with me. I’m no good at introducing ponies to Christianity, but I’ll introduce them to eggnog, by gum.”
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You got me hooked, I came for the "joys of eggnog" and am staying to see what exactly Jack and Lyra can come up with. (and of course the eggnog)
This I am excited for.
Maybe it's just the Christmas hype, but I like the looks of this.
Beat line of diologe I've ever read.
Well, it was cheesy and goofy, but it's always nice to see some Catholicism in fanfiction!
Now I'm expecting a bad case of dysentery to come into play somehow.
At risk of sounding like a moron, I have to ask: what's Eggnog?
I'm not sure if it's a good thing or bad thing that Weird Al's "Pretty Fly For a Rabbi" came on my shuffle while I was reading this.
3595401 A traditional winter holiday drink. It's made with dairy products, eggs, sweetener, and spice like nutmeg. Sometimes also liquor. Your local grocery store likely has it at this time of year.
Finally, the long-awaited Christianity fic, without the typical toothache-inducing preachiness you'd expect from a "Christian fanfic".
Though it feels, hm, weird to see the protagonist going near-fanatic over this exotic "eggnog" thing when it's something mostly unknown to non-American readers.
3595455
thank you. The only answers I typically get from people are 'it's gross' or 'it's delicious' which doesn't answer my question.
3596374 Its a very North American drink to be sure and tends to be a very polarizing beverage much like marmite in that you either love it or hate it I'm told.
Here is a typical eggnog recipe (You can omit the bourbon) Most eggnog consumed here is mass produced though many still make it themselves.
I'm a huge sucker for HiE fics that skip right past the messiness of first contact and dive into slice-of-life shenanigans.
And god damn do I love eggnog.
Whoa whoa whoa, what's this about a pony crucifix debacle? You mean to say that you mention this but give no explanation?
I just... I...
Damn, I think I'm invested.
I think the bishop should have shot for Baalam's donkey instead; she saw angels, translated God's will to man, and was a speaking ungulate. Her as a saint ought to have some report with the asinine population of Equestria!
I was not ready for that.
I'm intrigued! Fics that deal with G-d and religion in an Equestrian setting are (or at least so I thought) few and far between, and I hope I may be forgiven for assuming that much of the fandom would be hostile to the idea. So fics like this are a breath of fresh air for me.
Ah, inculturation! You gotta love it!
I take it Extension is involved in this somehow?
oh, eggnog if you are homemade your great if your mass produced you taste like shit or an M.R.E if you prefer. note to everyone; if you get the chance at Amish made eggnog buy it especially if they make milkshakes.
3595421
then you must be blessed because he was on the show or maybe not?