Where are the toys of yesteryear? Such is the lament of this poem by Scott Bates.
John Donne’s poem on the Nativity shows us a way out of our imprisoned existence.
In Scott Bates’s updated nativity scene, there is no room for Mary and Josephn in the Holiday Inn.
Applying “Hichhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” to the nativity scene opens up interesting perspectives on the animals that are present.
Anne Porter shows us how “the fresh truth of children” is central to the Christmas experience.
A Scott Bates version of the “Holly and Ivy” carol shows how multiple religious traditions blend seamlessly in Christmas rituals.
Charles Dickens helped solidify the idea of Christmas in the minds of 19th century England by his descriptions in “The Pickwick Papers.”
Scott Bates’s “The Night before Christmas on the Moon” delightfully sets Clement Moore’s beloved poem in a lunar landscape.
Comparing the Japanese film “Departures” with “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” give special insight into the meaning of Christmas.
Here’s a non-Christmas tree poem by Scott Bates for friends of the environment.
Spiritual Sunday Yesterday we had a white Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I am visiting my parents. The world was brown when we went to bed and white when we awoke. The symbolism of Christmas snow lies in the promise of wiping everything clean and starting anew. Grace appears to enter our fallen world. That’s [...]
Sports Saturday I don’t know whether bird watching is officially considered a sport but, what with Christmas falling on a “Sports Saturday,” let’s say it is. That way I have an excuse for writing about the annual Christmas bird count. Every year, between the middle of December and the first week in January, bird watchers [...]
Film Friday It’s Christmas Eve, which gives me an excuse to write about what I consider cinema’s greatest Christmas movie: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a Wonderful Life is a variation of the archetypal Christmas story, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Both feature extraterrestrial spirits. Scrooge is shown how the world will become [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Otey Parish, my childhood church 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 [...]
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 [...]
