Saturday – Christmas
We waited too long to buy our Christmas tree this year, which meant that our regular greenhouse sold out of trees when I went by. This turned out for the good however, as yesterday I toured my mother’s 18 acres of woods searching for a tree with my Washington, D.C. son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. I think we obtained a white pine although I’m not sure. Anyway it’s wonderfully shaped and is now standing in our living room, complete with lights and ornaments. Finding it ourselves excited 9-year-old Alban no end.
He’s also excited by our bird feeders, especially our cage of suet, which has been attracting hairy and downy woodpeckers, chickadees, and a Carolina wren. Years ago I shared a poem by my father that compared feeders to Christmas trees, with the birds as ornaments. Here it is again. And Merry Christmas.
Slightly amended from a Dec. 16, 2010 post
My father wrote Christmas poems for years, sending them out as the family Christmas card and also publishing them in the Sewanee newspaper, which my mother founded and ran for years. In addition to being a fine poet of light verse, my father was an enthusiastic bird watcher, and the poem below—one of my favorites—combines his passions.
Seemingly straightforward, “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner” is actually about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn a cedar into a Christmas tree. Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.
The transformation occurs “trysmegistically,” Hermes Trismegistus being an ancient philosopher associated with the Greek messenger of the gods. Hermes moved between heaven and earth, opening up concourse between the mystical and the mundane. The poem describes the birds as angels, and one thinks of the Edmund Sears carol about Christmas angels “bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Here we see angel-like birds “feasting and flying and doing a show/For watchers on the earth below.”
We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men” (and women): that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.
The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner
By Scott Bates
You can’t exactly call it greed
When birds at feeders feed and feed
On endless quantities of seed;
It’s sleeping in the cold all night
And doing prodigies of flight
That gives a bird an appetite.
They wait their turns with impatience
Perched on the cedar by the fence
Like so many Christmas ornaments,
Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee,
Turning it, trismegistically,
Into an ancient Christmas tree
With angels hurrying to and fro
Feasting and flying and doing a show
For watchers on the earth below.
