Poem 30 - Christmas party at the South Danbury Church

This week, we’ll do a Christmas poem—a little early. In the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a poem about children at Christmastime seems a good remedy for broken hearts.

I remember those church programs. We’d work for weeks on the rehearsal. The program was the same every year, and you’d move up from misc. angel (or. misc. shepherd or wise man) to Mary (or Joseph) to narrator as you moved through the grades. After hearing the gospel story of Jesus’s birth read so many times, I now have it memorized: In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled….

But only after reading this poem do I remember, too, the years that Alvin Quarne dressed up in a Santa suit to hand out brown paper lunch sacks filled with peanuts in the shell, hard candy, and oranges. I remember, now, thinking as a kid, Santa really shouldn’t be in church. Not yet knowing the word “secular,” I certainly understood the idea.

Christmas party at the South Danbury Church

Donald Hall

December twenty-first

we gather at the white Church festooned

  red and green, the tree flashing

green-red lights beside the altar.

 After the children of Sunday School

recite Scripture, sing songs,

  and scrape out solos,

they retire to dress for the finale,

 to perform the pageant

again: Mary and Joseph kneeling

   cradleside, Three Kings,

shepherds and shepherdesses.  Their garments

   are bathrobes with mothholes,

cut down from the Church’s ancestors.

   Standing short and long,

they stare in all directions for mothers,

   sisters and brothers,

giggling and waving in recognition,

   and at the South Danbury

Church, a moment before Santa

   arrives with her ho-hos

and bags of popcorn, in the half-dark

   of whole silence, God

enters the world as a newborn again.

from The New Criterion (Jan. 1995)