CHRISTMAS COMES

by Peter Neil Carroll

For most of the 19th century, the celebration of Christmas with Christmas trees and gift-giving remained a marginal phenomenon in American society. Most Americans remained skeptical about this new custom. Some felt that they had to choose between older English customs such as hanging stockings for presents on the fireplace and the Christmas tree as proper space for the placing of gifts. It was also hard to find the necessary ingredients for this German custom. Christmas tree farms had first to be created. And ornaments needed to be produced. The most significant steps toward integrating Christmas into popular American culture came in the context of the American Civil War. In January 1863 Harper’s Weekly published on its front page the image of Santa Claus visiting the Union Army in 1862. This image, which was produced by the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, represents the very first image of Santa Claus. —Thomas Adam, “How Christmas Became an American Holiday Tradition, with a Santa Claus, Gifts and a Tree,” The Conversation, December 6, 2021

Today isn’t my holiday;

neither did the Puritans celebrate Christmas—

only after huddled masses, tempest tost

slipped through Ms Liberty’s golden door

did Santa tumble down the chimney.

 

So what? says the bored look

in my child’s eye. All day we shall suffer

her shame, born to pagan parents,

she will see us through the eyes

of little friends who believe.  

 

Yes, Virginia, today we will dash to church.

Not to pray, mind you, but to see the unseen

wretched refuse lining on cold sidewalks  

and to serve those we will have

with us always, strung out

like light bulbs at St. Anthony’s.

 

At noon, we dollop beans and rice,

turkey, spuds, chopped carrots and greens.

Everyone polite, clean, stiff-backed,

without voice or tune

or jingled bell, only the scrape of chairs,

spoons tinkling in tepid cups.

 

Peter Neil Carroll’s newest collections of poems are Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life  (Turning Point, 2022) and This Land, These People: The 50 States (Press Americana) that just won the 2022 Prize Americana. He is currently Poetry Moderator of Portside.org and lives in northern California.

PILGRIMS PROGRESS

by Deborah Gorlin

Phineas Pratt's Grave in Charlestown MA

The inscriptions a kid could cartoon

on a gravestone, crude and simplistic,

the skull-soul effigy a kind of gothic lithic

Jack-o-lantern, wide hollows for eyes,

triangle for nose, slotted mouth,

snaggle-toothed, Medusa-like heads

winging hair. A second childhood

for the Puritan church as some feature

breasts, amen, as God-besotted poet

Edward Taylor wrote unblushingly,

his syntax, don’t ask, “to put these

nibbles, then my mouth into and suckle

me therewith humbly pray.” Gravestones

that put one in mind of crumbly English

biscuits, taken at teatime. Their headboards

face east towards the sunrise, when the dead

will wake one fine Sunday morning to the smell

of pancakes the Lord makes at a sleepover.

 

But the news today tells me they won’t

wait—rebranded their black white outfits,

buckled shoes, top hats, dressed this time

as the half-naked shaman in bear skins,

horn helmet, face paint, just like their old

enemies the Indians, why not, it’s on their land,

the Senate floor, to save us from those devils

in Pederast Forest. Fake 'em out. Boys. 

An impatient breed these new pilgrims, grown

young, who, in their first iteration, claimed

that specters in dreams and visions, those

with a third nipple, an ugly birthmark, a black

cat familiar, were evidence in a court of law

for burning witches and warlocks. Emboldened,

always exceptional, they invent new ways to rise

from their shallow graves of history, their scraggly

tombstones askew, who refuse, even their God, to die.

 

Deborah Gorlin is the author of two books of poems, Bodily Course (White Pine Poetry Press Prize) and Life of the Garment (Bauhan Publishing, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize). She has published in a wide range of journals including Poetry, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, Bomb, Connecticut Review, Women’s Review of Books, New England Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Recent poems appear in Plume, On the Seawall, Chicago Quarterly, Trampoline, and the Ekphrastic Review. Emeritus associate faculty of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she serves as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. 

OUR MYTHS

by Howard Winn

from Pilgrim ancestry
that glorifies individuality
is a made-up story
that makes the official
history of our cultural
sources appear to honor
independence of belief
when in truth our national
first source was in the
world of the Puritans
quite willing to kill those
not of their sect with
other fables to guide them
to their versions of the moral
life for their redemption
in conflict with that of the pure
whom they would condemn
to the Hell of their dogma
for the beginning of our
nation was mired in the
bigotry of faith and creed
was the key to belonging
and individuality was a sin


Howard Winn's poetry has been published most recently in Mississippi's Valley Voices Literary Journal in Mississippi and Maine's The Aurorean Literary Journal.