Spiritual Sunday Snow currently blankets southern Maryland as we enter the final days leading up to Christmas, making this the perfect time to print Christina Rossetti’s gorgeous poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter.”I love how it begins with hard and cold images and concludes with a simple gift of the heart. Although God is worshipped by […]
Tag Archives: Christmas
What Can I Give Him? Give Him My Heart
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Christina Rossetti, Julian of Norwich, Religion, Winter Comments closed
Midwinter Transformation: A Poem
A cold snap has hit the American east coast, including Maryland, and we are experiencing what Christina Rossetti calls “bleak midwinter,” with temperatures moving down into the teens. To cheer myself up, I turn to one of my father’s Christmas poems. My father has been writing these poems annually for years. He sends them out […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Bird Watcher's Christmas Dinner", Nature, Scott Bates Comments closed
An ABC of Children’s Books
As we enter the holiday season, you can expect a number of posts on children’s books. I have mentioned several times how one of my father’s great joys when we were growing up was reading us the books he had loved as a child. We got extra reading around the Christmas season. Here’s a poem […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "ABC of Books for Christmas", Children, children's books, Scott Bates Comments closed
The Divine Comedy, Doggerel Version
For a change of pace as we enter the Christmas season, I share here a light, witty, and very smart poem by my father on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poem grew out of research that he was doing on Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet who has been his scholarly subject. Don’t worry if you don’t […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dante Dance", Add new tag, Dante, Divine Comedy, Scott Bates Comments closed
Peace on Earth and Good Will to All of You
“Ring out the old, ring in the new,” Tennyson writes in In Memoriam (see last Friday’s post). Bells mark different stages in Tennyson’s grieving process, and bells also defined my Sewanee childhood: All Saints’ Chapel has a fabulous carillon, which would play every Sunday afternoon and on special occasions. So to ring in 2010, I turned […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Comments closed
Reconnecting with the Chimes Within
One of my favorite Christmas stories when I was growing up was Raymond Macdonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang.” I write today to figure out why. You can click here to read it. The story is about a church with a tower so high that no one can see the top. It is reputed to […]
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Books Unleashed in Christmas Carrels
On this Christmas day, I want to acknowledge one of the greatest gifts I ever received from my parents: my love of reading. Both are voracious readers, and my father (Scott Bates) would read to me and my brothers every evening. This included, for each of us, both a story or chapter and a poem. […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Christmas Carrel", children's books, Scott Bates Comments closed
