From “The Bride of the Mistletoe” by James Lane Allen in The Ultimate Christmas Collection:
“It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what they had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
“The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop…. Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house. Nearby was a thicket of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.
“Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a genial torrent through all days and nights of the year… but never with so inundating a movement as at this season. And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor over well-chosen chips.
“Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled, rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate….
“Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the mistletoe — the holly — the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty men — the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives — the turkey and the quail…. They were in sight there — the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into offerings to the dark solstice….”
From “Christmas 1949” in Christmas Poems by Dorothy Stott Shaw:
Saturn and Mars have met and kissed
And passed and gone their innocent ways,
And solstice-ward the pattern moves
Of lengthening nights and shrinking days.
Two planets blossom in the west
Like stem-less flowers of yellow light;
Westward the constellations move
In spangled splendor through the night.
Motionless in the shimmering dark,
Hushed in the hollow under the hill,
The trees stand tall to touch the stars;
The snow clings fast; the twigs are still….
