Seasonal Poem

Here's something by Billy Collins, whose work I haven't posted before. I like this one a lot.

The Christmas Sparrow
The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid, flapping sound, soft, insistent—

wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs where I saw a small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in on the cold night
through the flap of the basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth

But outside, when I uncupped my hands
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes wide open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked in a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

Tuesday Project Roundup: This Counts

Putting up the tree counts as a project, right? I did make a ten-minute tree skirt out of felt.

Then, of course, someone was upset that the tree got fabric and he couldn't fit underneath it to sit on said fabric, so I brought down the remnants for him:

Mood lighting!

Fruitcake!

Yesterday I made fruitcake, the kind where you raid the Whole Foods bulk aisle for fancy dried things and then soak the cake in booze and age it for a month. The Anne of Green Gables-reading part of me likes doing something so "old fashioned" (if not downright medieval); the drinker in me likes the booze part; and the adult reader in me thinks of Laurie Colwin:

Lately I have begun to think less of holiday and have turned my attention to the idea of winter, of trying to fill the house with good things... I want to make a gesture toward that longed-for simpler time by producing something that is made only once a years.

(from the essay "How to Face the Holidays," in More Home Cooking.)

Also: BOOZE!

Advent Calendars In Spaaaaace!

Now that it's December, it's time once again for my favorite part of "the holidays": The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. It's at the Atlantic this year (I guess its creator went there from the Big Picture blog?) but it will give you an image from the Hubble telescope every day from now until Christmas. And we all know how I feel about space pictures.

Here is today's image, the unpoetcially-named UGC 1810:
And here's something to ponder while you look at it, from the Upanishads:
The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not.

Did Judy Garland Ever Sing A Happy Christmas Song?

As you know, she sang "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in Meet Me in St. Louis, which was such a sad song it featured a small child crying during the performance. But just this week I was watching In The Good Old Summertime and there she was singing another wistful little Christmas song:


Poor Judy. You kind of want her to belt out "Joy to the World" next. (Did she?)

Counting My Blessings

I've been joking lately about "First World Problems," such as not being able to find a suitable new and fancy house, or being irritated with aspects of my specialized office job, or not liking any of the coughfivecough winter coats I have, and you know what? Those are not even problems. It just took Irving Berlin and Bing to remind me.

"Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep," from White Christmas:

Did We All Have A Merry Christmas?

Remember, the week after Christmas is the time to go shop for yourself, as this vintage ad reminds us:
(Click for big. I don't really advocate buying or giving handguns.)

"...a tight Christmas"

Because this is a pantheistic blog, here's a poem to balance Monday's atheist cartoon. It's by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mr. City Lights, and was published in 1959 in A Coney Island of the Mind.

Christ Climbed Down

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crèches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carolers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Nothing Says Christmas Like A Horn Section

Just yesterday I was wishing that there were more Christmas soul albums, and then I discovered Otis Redding covering "White Christmas." Released posthumously as a single with "Merry Christmas, Baby," this is the second-most awesome Christmas song ever. (Here's the most awesome one.)


Also: Nothing gets one excited for Christmas more than NOT working two jobs in December.

Happy Christmas Eve

Like the rest of the blogging world, I won't be posting the rest of the week because of Christmas. But I have more plans than celebration and vacation--I'm going to attempt to move the blog to Blogspot (gasp!) to help with the organization and overall look.*

So I will leave you with three things to read for the next three days:

1. Tonight I'll be reading The Tailor Of Gloucester (this link even has the illustrations!) to everyone. Mr. Isbell can humor me, Toby can look at the pictures of the mice, and I can commiserate with the Tailor about not finishing his projects and buttonhole quality. And we can all say NO MORE TWIST.
2. If you'd rather read something to yourself or if your cat has a longer attention span than mine, I recommend the Christmas chapter in The Wind in the Willows. It's the winter chapter where Mole rediscovers his old home after living at Rat's all summer and takes Ratty there on Christmas Eve. There are also caroling field mice.
3. And if this is all too cute, here's something adult you can read: It's Nigel Slater describing Christmas in Vienna in a Guardian column last year. You will want to listen to Strauss.
   

*I am a little nervous about this, but I have reinforcements I can call in (hi Amber!) to fix things if the move goes horribly awry. So if you don't see a blog here next Monday, don't panic; it just means that I'll need another week to have someone who knows what she's doing fix things.

Tuesday Project Roundup: All I Want For Christmas Is Some Crafty Time

And after today, I will have time--I have tomorrow through January 4th OFF. I'm going to try to finish that taupe cardigan (I have to start over on the back, though, so it may not happen), sew two shirts, and knit one of these cowl-y scarf-y things:

(Found, along with a pattern, on the suitably titled CopyCat blog of craftiness.)