However and whatever you celebrate in December, may it bring you and yours much joy and all good things. I offer these two poems for those who may be looking for some “all is calm.”

To read “Holidays” and “Another Kind of Christmas” click:

One of my favorite holiday poems is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, because it’s more introspective than most of his other works – a private moment outside all the hustle and bustle of most major holidays, but in particular for me, all our busy days during this holiday season.

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Holidays

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows;−
The happy days unclouded to their close;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;−a fairy tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

“Holidays” is in the public domain.

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I wrote this poem because my part of America is often mocked for its lack of connection to the “traditional” Christmas of colder climes:

Another Kind of Christmas

by Nona Blyth Cloud

A bright parched sky over cold cracked earth –
Our north wind stole the last tear from air’s face
Abandoning a static-crackling still life in its wake

Lights cover house fronts and the dead lawns,
Illumine green trees aglitter from some other world
Where snow rides their wind down to a sleeping earth

Dreaming of a spring which will have teased this sea-desert
Long before its welcome home among the tall green trees –
Our spring of tiny blue butterflies disappearing from the dunes

Too many Christmas songs buried in snow’s white dazzle,
Which never fell from some other world on Bethlehem
From a bright parched sky over cold cracked earth

“Another Kind of Christmas” – © 2015 by Nona Blyth Cloud

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