The Wonders of Christmas Cards 1. Foot(hoof)prints

Any reader of this blog will know that come December I cannot resist offering some examples of the weirdness of Christmas cards.  Long before I blogged, in that other age when 'post' involved red boxes rather than blue buttons on screen, I always tried to find something interesting about every card we received.   I learned that a second look often finds amazing things.  Here's one from the first batch we received this week (some senders are very efficient!),

It's a fine picture, with three fine camels.  The stable is even further from the town than it usually is (why is it often positioned far from the houses like a country bus stop?) but that is quite a routine card issue.  My attention is drawn to the hoof marks in the sand.

A set of them confirm that the first camel has hoofed it from the desert.  But the  second camel?  Has it been walking exactly in the hoof marks of camel number one?  Because there are no more hoofmarks behind it than behind the first one.  And camel 3 must be doing the same because there are no spare hoofmarks around it either.

Many of us must know the moving but now overused prose poem Footprints.  It tells of how the Christian sees footprints in the sand where God and (s)he have walked together and a section, when life was tough, where a set disappear.  Had God left?  No, he's carried the believer in those times.

Maybe the first camel had carried the other two?