In “Christmas at Sea,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s speaker is both buoyed up and saddened by childhood Christmas memories.
Tag Archives: Christmas
Christmas During Life’s Storms
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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.
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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.
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The Constellated Sounds of Bells
First Sunday after Christmas Sewanee, Tennessee, where I spend each Christmas, is a great place for bells and chimes. There is the 56-bell carillon in All Saints’ Chapel—once one of the largest in the world although probably no more—and the single Otey Parish bell. There are also the bells in Breslin Tower, which strike the […]
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Our Christmas Owes Much to Walter Scott
While Charles Dickens can be credited with resurrecting Christmas, Sir Walter Scott paved the way in “Marmion” with his depiction of Christmas and pre-Christmas banquets.
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Tell of Winter’s Tales and Mirth
Robert Herrick’s “New Year’s Gift” urges us to celebrate fully the twelve days of Christmas in the same spirit as that which he urges young virgins to gather their rosebuds while they may.
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Joy Shall Be Yours in the Morning
Kenneth Grahame has a particularly beautiful Christmas story in “Wind in the Willows.”
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The Minstrels Played Their Christmas Tune
William Wordsworth celebrates Christmas was a poem about minstrels singing Christmas carols.
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The Divine Enters thru Imagination’s Holes
If Christmas is about the entrance of the divine into the human, then works of the imagination are always filled with the Christmas spirit.
