A Very Merry Christmas to You and Yours . . .

                   

Two for Tuesday: Christmas

“Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weaknesses and loneliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and to ask yourself if you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open? Are you willing to do these things for a day? Then you are ready to keep Christmas!”
~ Henry van Dyke

Music by the Trans Siberian Orchestra, “Christmas Canon”

                   

Advent

Wind whistling, as it does
in winter, and I think
nothing of it until

it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down

to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned—then glad

to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.

Look, in my surprise
I somehow split a wall,
the last one in the house

we’re making of gingerbread.
We’ll have to improvise:
prop the two halves forward

like an open double door
and with a tube of icing
cement them to the floor.

Five days until Christmas,
and the house cannot be closed.
When she peers into the cold

interior we’ve exposed,
she half-expects to find
three magi in the manger,

a mother and her child.
She half-expects to read
on tablets of gingerbread

a line or two of Scripture,
as she has every morning
inside a dated shutter

on her Advent calendar.
She takes it from the mantel
and coaxes one fingertip

under the perforation,
as if her future hinges
on not tearing off the flap

under which a thumbnail picture
by Raphael or Giorgione,
Hans Memling or David

of apses, niches, archways,
cradles a smaller scene
of a mother and her child,

of the lidded jewel-box
of Mary’s downcast eyes.
Flee into Egypt, cries

the angel of the Lord
to Joseph in a dream,
for Herod will seek the young

child to destroy him. While
she works to tile the roof
with shingled peppermints,

I wash my sugared hands
and step out to the deck
to lug the shutter in,

a page torn from a book
still blank for the two of us,
a mother and her child.

~ Mary Jo Salter

                   

Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing

My mother was not impressed with her beauty;

once a year she put it on like a costume,

plaited her black hair, slick as cornsilk, down past her hips,

in one rope-thick braid, turned it, carefully, hand over hand,

and fixed it at the nape of her neck, stiff and elegant as a crown,

with tortoise pins, like huge insects,

some belonging to her dead mother,

some to my living grandmother.

Sitting on the stool at the mirror,

she applied a peachy foundation that seemed to hold her down, to trap her,

as if we never would have noticed what flew among us unless it was weighted and bound in its mask.

Vaseline shined her eyebrows,

mascara blackened her lashes until they swept down like feathers;

her eyes deepened until they shone from far away.

Now I remember her hands, her poor hands, which, even then were old from scrubbing,

whiter on the inside than they should have been,

and hard, the first joints of her fingers, little fattened pads,

the nails filed to sharp points like old-fashioned ink pens,

painted a jolly color.

Her hands stood next to her face and wanted to be put away, prayed

for the scrub bucket and brush to make them useful.

And, as I write, I forget the years I watched her

pull hairs like a witch from her chin, magnify

every blotch—as if acid were thrown from the inside.

But once a year my mother

rose in her white silk slip,

not the slave of the house, the woman,

took the ironed dress from the hanger—

allowing me to stand on the bed, so that

my face looked directly into her face,

and hold the garment away from her

as she pulled it down.

~ Toi Derricotte

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