Tag Archives: Christmas

An Xmas Story about Political Polarization

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2022

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a Christmas story in 1848 about rival political factions learning to get along. One can dream.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2022

Dickens didn’t so much invent Christmas–or even reinvent it–as supercharge it. “A Christmas Carol” was key in the endeavor.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2021

Growing up, our Christmases were always filled with books. This Scott Bates poem captures the spirit.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 18, 2021

In this Christmas tree poem, T.S. Eliot seeks to reconnect with his childhood sense of wonder.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 27, 2020

Dorothy Parker and Scott Bates have poems that see the nativity from the vantage point of commoners.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2020

John Heath-Stubbs’s “On the Nativity” is one of my favorite Christmas poems.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2020

Scott Bates’s Mrs. Santa Claus poems push environmental and peace themes. The next few posts consist of some of these poems.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2020

In Richard Wilbur’s “Christmas Hymn,” low and high meet as we have the promise of worlds reconciled.

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2020

e.e. cummings’s Christmas poem “from spiraling ecstatically this” disrupts normal patterns to reveal the elusive nature of the divine.