Christmas symbolism, including the yule-log, comes from many different faith traditions. This helps explain its power.
Tag Archives: Christmas
The Tradition of the Yule-Log
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.”
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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.
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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
There’s More to Christmas Than We Think
When fundamentalist Christians say that there is a war on Christmas, they point to secular and pagan threats. But many of the symbols they embrace are borrowed from other religions traditions, as this Scott Bates poem makes clear.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Christmas at the Courthouse", nativity scene, Scott Bates Comments closed
