December 1

     My own shepherd, Ranger the dog, reminds me that the human shepherds were half asleep most of the time. It was the dogs who stayed awake and alert all night, guarding the flocks. The human shepherds depended on their dogs to sound the alert if anything out of the ordinary happened. It isn't recorded if the dogs barked at the angel, rousing the shepherds out of their slumber. But I think it's likely.
     Half asleep and half awake—in Celtic mythology the state of being "in between" is both sacred and magical. In the shadows, at twilight and at dawn, when we are neither here nor there, we can slip easily between the worlds. While the rest of the world lay in deep slumber, the shepherds were only half asleep. Neither awake nor fully dreaming, they were in just the right frame of mind for a message from the sacred realms.