Beautiful text passage in tribute to Christmas?

December 1, 2024 3:18 PM

I’ve been invited to a fireside gathering where we each read a passage that relates to the upcoming holiday and that has special meaning for the reader. I am not a christmassy person but I love this group of people and am glad to be invited. Can you suggest a seasonal poem or passage that is beautiful not bleak, other than the famous Truman Capote bit? Nor the famous David sedaris bit - more old fashioned?
posted by mmiddle to Religion & Philosophy (7 answers total)

Susan Cooper’s The Shortest Day, maybe?
posted by eirias at 3:21 PM on December 1 [5 favorites]

Best answer: E. B. White's Christmas message, 1952. If it's a bit long, you could team up with another reader.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:49 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]

i love Thomas Hardy's The Oxen https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53215/the-oxen-56d232503c32d and Geoffery Hill's Christmas Trees: https://reflections.yale.edu/article/faith-and-citizenship-turbulent-times/christmas-trees
posted by PinkMoose at 4:13 PM on December 1 [1 favorite]

Also probably too long, but Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales." It's hard to describe but it's nostalgic without being sentimental -- or maybe nostalgic for how you remember things being rather than how they actually were. There's probably a portion of it you could read if it's a piece you like.

(Listening to my recording of Thomas reading it is one of my favorite holiday traditions.)
posted by edencosmic at 5:44 PM on December 1 [2 favorites]

Apologies -- I meant to link to "A Child's Christmas in Wales" for you.
posted by edencosmic at 5:59 PM on December 1 [2 favorites]

Something from A Christmas Carol?

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!

... they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

posted by paduasoy at 9:32 PM on December 1 [2 favorites]

Tove Jansson's Letter from Santa Claus is quite lovely
posted by lousywiththespirit at 9:56 PM on December 1 [3 favorites]