Tuesday – Christmas Eve Over the past few cold and rainy days, chickadees, goldfinches, titmice, and nuthatches have been swarming out feeders, bringing to mind one of my father’s Christmas poems. I first posted it nine years ago. I excerpt a portion of previous post, only adding that (this in response to the allusion to […]
Tag Archives: Christmas
Feeding Birds in the Bleak Midwinter
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Bird Watcher's Christmas Dinner", birdfeeders, Hermes Trismegistus, Scott Bates Comments closed
The Tradition of the Yule-Log
Christmas symbolism, including the yule-log, comes from many different faith traditions. This helps explain its power.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Yule-Tide", Seymour William Kean, syncretism, yule-log Comments closed
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Nativity
This playful Scott Bates environmental poem looks at the nativity story and observes that we are in desperate need of a repetition.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged climate change, Environmental destruction, Scott Bates, syncretism Comments closed
Now the Work of Christmas Begins
Thursday My brother Sam alerted me to this timely poem by Howard Thurman, a civil rights activist and African American Quaker. I love the way it moves from the public to the private in the final line, turning from good works to inner peace. The Work of Christmas When the song of the angels is […]
The Lord of Life Be Born in Earth
Christmas Let Henry Vaughan’s Christmas poem usher you into this holy day. Vaughan is one of Britain’s great nature poets—he had a profound influence on Wordsworth—and this poem features his characteristic nature imagery. When Vaughan is obsessed with sin, he compares God’s grace to the sun (which “doth shakes light from his locks”) and his […]
Love Was with Me in the Night
May Sarton’s imagines love without weight in her poem “Christmas Light.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Christmas Light, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, May Sarton Comments closed
Joy of Life Revealed in Love’s Creation
In Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio,” the shepherds stand in for the working class, who find love and personhood in the birth of Jesus.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Christmas Oratorio", "Nativity", For the Time Being, shepherds, W. H. Auden Comments closed
Christmas During Life’s Storms
In “Christmas at Sea,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s speaker is both buoyed up and saddened by childhood Christmas memories.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Christmas at Sea", home, Robert Louis Stevenson Comments closed
Dickens Returned Xmas to Medieval Roots
Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” didn’t so much invent Christmas as we have come to know it as take it back to its medieval roots.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol, Marmion, Pickwick Papers, Sir Walter Scott Comments closed
