According to an ancient Sardinian legend, the bodies of those who are born on Christmas Eve will never dissolve into dust but are preserved until the end of time.

Deledda frames a local belief as “ancient legend,” signaling her recurring literary interest in Sardinian folklore and the way popular religion blends with pre-Christian notions of the marvelous. The claim that Christmas Eve births confer incorruptibility links bodily preservation to sacred time: the night associated with Christ’s nativity becomes a threshold when ordinary biological decay is suspended. Read symbolically, the legend expresses a community’s desire for continuity—certain lives are imagined as literally resisting oblivion—while also hinting at the moral prestige attached to proximity to the holy. In Deledda’s work, such legends often function less as doctrine than as cultural atmosphere shaping characters’ fears, hopes, and sense of fate.