The
Spiders’ Gift
A Christmas story based
on a Ukrainian folktale
Long
ago, in a forest clearing not far from a small Ukrainian
village, an old woman lived alone. She had no companions
except the spiders who wove their lacy webs in the dark
corners of her cabin and feasted on the fat flies they caught.
She had few possessions: a straw-stuffed mattress to sleep on, an earthenware pot for cooking, and a rough-hewn table and bench where she ate and worked. But she did not think of herself as poor, for she owned a fine steel needle and she earned her living with it.
Every morning she would climb down from her warm bed atop the clay oven, eat a breakfast of bran porridge, and sweep out her one room with a broom made of sticks from the forest.
If the weather was fine, she would take her work outside to a bench in front of her cabin. There she would embroider red and black flowers and leaves on white linen blouses while the birds sang and small forest creatures scurried through the ferns outside her door.
On rainy days, she worked indoors near the spiders, who were just as busy as she was.
On market days, the woman walked to the village, where she caught up on news and visited friends as she traded needlework for such items as cheese, oats, flour for bread, carrots and onions for soup, and more plain garments and thread.
In the spring she picked sorrel for salad; in the summer she had berries for dessert; and in autumn she found mushrooms to flavor her soup, and walnuts to save for Christmas. But in winter, snow covered all the wild things that the forest provided.
One summer it rained almost every day. The old woman and the spiders worked hard indoors. That fall the wind blew, and she huddled near her warm stove. The spiders moved boldly out of their corners and built their webs close to the fire.
When villagers dropped in to visit after gathering mushrooms, they wondered about the webs. But the old woman said, “The spiders do their work and I do mine. We live peacefully together.”
That winter the snow fell early and long. Soon it was too deep for the woman to walk all the way to the village. That had never happened before. So each day she ate a little and embroidered a little and ventured into the forest for fallen branches to burn.
When Christmas Eve came, the snow was still very deep. Cold and hungry, the woman went to look for wood and found the broken-off top of a large pine tree lying green and beautiful in the snow. “A Christmas tree!” she exclaimed.
The tree filled the cabin with its wonderful scent. But it also made her sad, for it reminded her that she could not celebrate the holy day in the candle-filled wooden church in the village.
“This tree is as bare and empty as my cooking pot,” she thought. “I am too poor even to decorate it.”
With a heavy heart, the woman climbed into bed. The spiders listened as she said her prayers.
That night the wind blew and sleet drummed against the wooden walls of the cabin. The woman slept, but the spiders stayed up spinning.
When the pink and yellow fingers of dawn pried their way through the shutters, the old woman awoke to see her little tree transformed. Gossamer strands looping from branch to branch caught the light and shimmered with a silvery gleam. Her heart lightened as she admired the decorations the spiders had spun. How could she be sad amidst such beauty?
A jingling startled her. The ice storm had formed a crust hard enough to support a sleigh, and the villagers had remembered her. They bustled in, bringing beets, potatoes, cabbage, and freshly baked poppy-seed buns.
“How
horrid it must have been for you,” said a villager,
“snow-bound out here all alone.”
But the old woman smiled. “My spiders kept me company,” she said. “Look at their lovely gift.”
The villagers gazed in awe at the sparkling tree.
Winter eventually eased its grip on the Ukrainian highlands. The ferns of spring uncurled on the forest floor; summer sunshine brought rich harvests. That fall the old woman gathered many walnuts.
When winter returned with gentle snows, she brought a small pine tree into her cabin. The aroma stirred memories of the glittering decorations the spiders had given her the year before. “This year,” she thought, “I shall honor them for their kindness.”
On the last market day before Christmas, when she had sold her blouses and bought her week’s provisions, she kept a few coins to purchase some colored glass beads.
That evening she made decorations by stringing the beads on pieces of straw and anchoring them to walnut shells: eight spangly legs radiating from each round hump. She hung the nut-shell spiders on the tree in tribute to the busy creatures who had woven magic and hope into her Christmas the year before.
She also gave decorations to the villagers as thanks for their thoughtfulness. They, too, hung the nutshell spiders on their trees. And to this day, Ukrainian children make jeweled spiders to decorate their Christmas trees, and small spiders smile to see their dazzling likenesses dangling from the branches.
