The Amazing But True Chia® Fable
Many are the stories of the season recounted each year during the holidays. Here is one fable not oft told.
Tis the tale of Claus Chia®nitsky and his arrival in America a quarter century ago. Inheriting land in the plains of Delaware, Claus immigrated from his homeland, Kringlevania, a republic founded by Father Christmas’s love children. Claus stowed away to the new country to work the land and find a bride.
He arrived during a blizzard, protected from the elements by the traditional Kringlevanian astrakhan on his head. He wore all his worldly possessions or carried them in his knapsack, including a jar of grandma’s borscht and a packet of salvia columbariae seeds given him as a gift by Uncle Chaim the Gardener.
Claus was earnest, not adverse to hard work. He intended to breed jackalopes (Lepus-temperamentalus), having heard many a wondrous tale in the old country of the unique taste of their meat and toughness of their hide. He also intended to set aside a few acres to harvest dental floss. He’d been told by ancients back home more wise than he that Delaware’s soil was rich in the nutrients necessary for a bounteous crop of the snag-free floss cherished by the gentry.
To Chia®nitsky’s misfortune the harsh seaboard winter was a prelude to a spring too wet to plant his floss and summer weather so chaotic his fields didn’t produce enough hay to feed his herd of jackalopes. So harsh were conditions that the females couldn’t produce milk, which he knew to be a revered medicinal commodity, used holistically to treat neuritis, neuralgia and lower back pain.
So bad was his luck that Claus couldn’t find a dance partner at the Saturday night disco in the nearby village of Johnny Cake Landing. Not even Chrisma the Sculptor Girl, she also of Kringlevanian descent who lived in a cabin on a nearby hillock.
Chia®nitsky was distraught.
One bleak day, he sat, forlorn, petting the surviving jackalope he’d taken as a pet. It’s name was Chia®, for Claus’s dad, Clausimos, always told him, “A man can lose everything but his name, which he should pass on to the next generation no matter what else happens, or how he has to do it, even if he has to abbreviate it for packaging purposes.”
So bad was his luck, Claus pondered moving back home. He pulled his knapsack from the shelf.
Out fell the long forgotten packet of salvia columbariae seeds given him by Chaim the Gardener. As he tried to catch it, Claus remembered Chaim’s sage words (which he thought foolish at the time), “If you plant them anywhere, they will grow anywhere, and bring you fortune wherever you are anywhere.” Just then the packet hit the wooden floor next to Chia®, breaking open. Claus cried as the seeds spilled on the floor. So deep was his depression, he didn’t notice Chia® rolling about in the seeds.
The next day was the oddest Claus had ever known. The day was hot, the sun, bright. So he let Chia® roam the pastures. Then it commenced to snowing like he’d never seen before. Not in America. Nor in Kringlevania, for that matter, where it snowed year ‘round.
He hardly noticed Chia® when the pet returned at dusk. The jackalope pup trotted toward his favorite spot at the edge of the porch, brushing against Claus’s leg. Something felt different.
Chia®nitsky looked at his pet and stared in wonder. Chia® had grown a plush coat of green fur. “It is a glorious pelt indeed,” exclaimed Claus as Chia® frolicked in front of his farmhouse..
As fate would have it Chrisma the Sculptor Girl happened by just then. She noticed the jackalope. “What is your pet’s name,” she asked? When told, she marveled, “My, my, what a lovely Chia® pet. I’d love to sculpt him.”
The rest as they say is history. When neighbor, Wally Walgreen, opened a general store that December in Johnny Cake Landing, he put a couple Chia® pet sculptures on a shelf to see if they’d sell as stocking stuffers. So great was the demand that Chrisma, even with Claus’s help, could hardly make enough as people came from hither and yon for Chia® pets.
Now, come holiday time, shelves everywhere are stocked with earthen sculptures of Claus’s Chia® pet. Chaim the Gardener rocks away his days at his manse on the Mediterranean paid for with royalties.
And Claus and Chrisma live happily ever after, doing their own special disco, while Chia® frolics in the yard.
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