Tag Archives: Christmas

Reconnecting with the Chimes Within

By Robin Bates | Published: December 31, 2009

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

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2009

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.  […]

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Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2009

I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases.   In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam.  For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]

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Dead Hands Reaching Out to Comfort

By Robin Bates | Published: December 23, 2009

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s.    Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are […]

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Singing Carols in the Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2009

Thinking about my dead son in this Christmas season brings to mind Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the lengthy poem that he wrote over the course of 17 years lamenting the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.Hallam was a young man when he died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Tennyson describes his […]

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