An Easter to Christmas Story by Will Hackett
Long ago, a lonely seabird on the first leg of a great journey arrived at a distant land carrying a single cone from a fir tree. It was late autumn, and the cone was fully ripe with its pollen and seeds already mixed together within its scales. The bird, thinking he would be hungry after his passage, intended to eat the seeds, but he was now so very tired that he could hold on to his burden no longer. The cone plummeted to the earth where it came to rest on a sunny hill. Its seeds spilled forth and covered the ground where they would lay for most of the day until a distracted stag came rushing out from the nearby undergrowth and trampled them, pushing the seeds under the soil.
The winter was a particularly harsh one with frozen heaps of snow and ice that lingered into April, but the seeds relished in the cold—it softened their outer shells, and by late May a few seedlings could be seen pushing up through the soil seeking out the sun. Of these, most were eaten by forest animals, but one remained, and it burgeoned and flourished.
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