On Christmas Eve, the legend goes, animals gain the power of speech at midnight.

At Lyon Ranch in the Sonoma hills, dozens of rescued creatures give voice for five minutes or so every night, year-round — usually when their saviors, Rob and Robin Wolfe Lyon, have just turned out the bedroom light.

It starts with a dash down the paddock as ZZ Top, the zeedonk (zebra-donkey), and Hump-free, the dromedary (one-humped camel), take turns chasing each other’s tail.

“They go through this every night,” said Robin Wolfe Lyon. “You can hear them racing.”

That sets the five dogs barking and the 28 parrots squawking, “then the donkeys begin to hee-haw.

“Thank God we have wonderful neighbors,” she said with a laugh.

Amid the nightly commotion, one animal maintains a matronly composure: Kazzy, the Lyons’ full-grown Bactrian (two-humped) camel.

“Kazzy’s looking at them like ‘Oh, you children, time to go to bed,’” Wolfe Lyon said.

After all, the next day may well be a work day for 7-year-old Kazzy, the world’s first “therapy camel.”

The go-to camel

Trained since infancy to visit the sick and frail, Kazzy must be the most celebrated ungulate in California — if not American — history. She has appeared more than once on the Animal Planet cable channel, and a recent Hallmark Channel show followed her as she charmed a group of seniors at San Francisco’s Institute on Aging.

At least once a week during the spring and summer months, the Lyons bring Kazzy and some of their other trained animals to nursing homes and hospitals in Napa and around the North Bay, where they astonish and delight residents and staff alike.

Standing seven-and-a-half feet at the shoulder and weighing in at more than 1,700 pounds, Kazzy is the most genteel of guests: She knows her way around furniture, is house-trained and can even ride in an elevator.

And spitting? Don’t even mention it. Kazzy is not that kind of camel.

Camels spit when they’re frightened, angry or defensive, explained Wolfe Lyon, who trained in behavioral science at the University of California at Davis.

“Kazzy has none of those issues.”

Because she’s so well-behaved, Kazzy is a great in parades and has become the go-to camel for Christmas pageants like Napa’s Main Street Bethlehem, where the stately beast greeted thousands of visitors with her accustomed poise.

“She is an exceptional camel,” said Wolfe Lyon with a mother’s pride — and, in every way that matters, she and her husband have been Kazzy’s parents since three days after the camel’s birth in 2000.

They even sheltered the baby camel in their bed, while their children — Lynette, now 19 and studying at Napa Valley College and Billy, a 22-year-old who joined the Army and currently serves in Texas — became Kazzy’s older siblings.

The family worked together to make sure Kazzy — the only one of their 83 (at last count) pets not adopted through rescues — grew up surrounded by affection and calm, even in the midst of a parade full of sirens and flashing lights.

It all started in Napa

Wolfe Lyon bought Kazzy from a breeder with the dream of bringing cheer and comfort to elderly shut-ins, and used her college training to raise a camel who is welcome virtually everywhere — including Sonoma Plaza, where even chickens have been banished from the grounds.

Serene in her tasseled bridle, Kazzy is a living tribute to Wolfe Lyon’s late parents, Bill and Dorothy Wolfe, of the Wolfe Ranch on Napa’s Fourth Avenue.

The family always had room for needy animals: “I can remember, as a little girl, raising a rooster in one of my bedroom drawers,” Wolfe Lyon recalled of a chick she had won at a carnival.

“My mother said ‘What’s one more plate? What’s one more bowl of food?’”

When her parents grew old and moved to senior care facilities, Wolfe Lyon hatched her plan to brighten the lives of shut-ins in a really big way.

She’d visited with everyday animals like dogs and the occasional bird, but saw that some people didn’t care that much — they’d seen dogs and birds before.

But even the most withdrawn patients can’t ignore a camel. And with her parlor manners, bedroom eyes and velvety muzzle, Kazzy quickly wins their hearts.

 “It’s amazing how many people will engage with each other in a senior facility that have never talked before, because of the bond of the animals,” Wolfe Lyon said.

For love, not money

There is never a charge for time with the Lyon Ranch animals, no matter how far they travel.

“This isn’t a money making thing,” Wolfe Lyon said. “We support what we’re doing.

“We’re doing it because we love to do it, not because we want to get something.”

It’s all in honor of Bill and Dorothy Wolfe, who helped finance their daughter’s UC Davis education years ago.

To pay them back, she entered the airline industry as a flight attendant. There, she met another down-to-earth Californian who had taken to the air: pilot Robert Lyon, with whom she’ll soon celebrate 25 years of marriage.

The couple started small, with a cat; but soon, Robin began to follow her parents’ kind-hearted example of adopting animals in need of a home, and her husband joined in.

“The more animals we took in, the more I realized flying wasn’t much fun any more,” she said.

Retired in 1997, the couple earned licenses to rehabilitate wildlife, rescuing owls and returning them to the woods; zoo breeders began to call with newborns needing special care.

The ranch currently houses several servals, long-legged, long-eared African wildcats about twice the caliber of the American house cat. Daughter Lynette has hand-reared both an American bison (named Tonka) and a Watusi buffalo (Norman).

Over the years, the Lyons have earned a reputation for taking in hard-luck animals. Many of the ranch’s pets — including 13 cats — have outlived elderly owners; two of the dogs came all the way from Connecticut after their owner was killed in the 9/11 attacks.

Others, like the servals, came from breeders who couldn’t keep them because of various defects.

The family even returned from Napa’s Main Street Bethlehem with a new adoption: Touchingly, the sheep that attended the manger scene was pregnant and needed a home.

A wheelchair-friendly ranch

Though Kazzy is clearly the star, all of the Lyon Ranch animals are used to therapy visits: Nearly every Wednesday, the Lyons welcome seniors for a brown-bag lunch and parrot show.

Each visitor gets a small bucket of vegetables to feed the horses, donkeys, pygmy goats and camels, not to mention ZZ Top the zeedonk.

Wheelchairs are no problem: After Wolfe Lyon’s parents died, she spent her inheritance on having the ranch made safe for elderly visitors, hiring both a building architect and a landscape architect to redesign the 12-acre property for universal access.

That meant significant regrading, new paving and new decking at a cost she’d rather not share; but the result is a wheelchair-friendly ranch where the disabled can move around freely to feed and pet the animals.

“My dad would be really happy to know that this is what we used the money for,” Wolfe Lyon said.

Lyon Ranch is not open to the public; visit the Web site at www.lyonranch.org.