Tag Archives: Christmas

The Tradition of the Yule-Log

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2019

Christmas symbolism, including the yule-log, comes from many different faith traditions. This helps explain its power.

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A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Nativity

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2019

This playful Scott Bates environmental poem looks at the nativity story and observes that we are in desperate need of a repetition.

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Now the Work of Christmas Begins

By Robin Bates | Published: December 27, 2018

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 […]

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The Lord of Life Be Born in Earth

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2018

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 […]

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Love Was with Me in the Night

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2017

May Sarton’s imagines love without weight in her poem “Christmas Light.”

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Joy of Life Revealed in Love’s Creation

By Robin Bates | Published: December 31, 2016

In Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio,” the shepherds stand in for the working class, who find love and personhood in the birth of Jesus.

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Christmas During Life’s Storms

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2016

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

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2016

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.

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There’s More to Christmas Than We Think

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2016

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.

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