(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today in December 1987)

Calves for Christmas.

No, not the leg kind of calves, the baby kind of calves.

I grew up on a dairy farm and wintertime is calf-time.  Our cows were timed so they would have their calves during the winter months. Usually, peak calving time was right around Christmas.

Starting at age 5, it was my job to feed the bawling back and white little beggars.  I’d feed them in the morning and feed them again at night.

It was excruciatingly fun.

You see, calves are greedier than Wall Street brokers.  I would feed 15 calves.  I was armed with only three pails with nipples on them…three pails and a floppy piece of rubber hose.  Before any animal rights activists take offense, please remember at age 5, a 2-week-old calf probably out weighed me by a considerable amount

From the perspective of a 5-year old little boy, 15 drooling, bawling calves makes for a frightening confrontation.  Strategy number one was to sneak up on them.  This tactic worked once in every 100 attempt.  The object was to get inside the room and hang the buckets on the fence before they knew what was happening.

That way I could be ready for them before they were ready for me.

Typically, the calves tune in their ESP and were lined up at the fence before I ever made it in the door, ready to knock me over and trample me in their feeding frenzy.

Strategy number 2 was the full frontal attack.  I would rush into the room, screaming at the top of my lungs and try to get the pails hung on the fence while the calves were too shocked to do anything but stare.

Humorous, but highly ineffective.

I’m surprised those calves survived.  It’ s not that I beat them to death with a floppy rubber hose, it’s just that they didn’t get much to eat.

Invariably, as I tried to swing the buckets over the fence so they could get at the nipples, one of them would knock his head on the bottom of one of the pails.

Then, being the 5-year hot head that I was, I would throw down the buckets in disgust and scream in rage as the milk dribbled down my glasses.

Oh, how I pine for the days of childhood.

So the calves went hungry; I got soaked with milk; and my 5-year-old vocabulary was filled with surprising variety of four-letter words.

All of this just in time for Christmas.