The wind blows strong today.
Snow is on its way,
And Christmas is not far away.
What is this day to you and me?
It didn't start in Nazareth,
And neither in Galilee.
It goes much farther back in history,
Well before christianity.
It actually started as new year's day!
It fell originally on winter solstice day,
December 21, as we know it today,
Which was to say winter's on its way.
But you can also see it another way:
Longer days are on the way;
Time of rebirth, you might say.
Ancient Romans celebrated it that way:
Festival of the Kalends, they called then.
A celebration of the beginning: the First Day.
Ancient Romans loved to celebrate.
So they feasted the old year too,
With a longer festival before the Kalends.
Saturnalia they called it, quite logically,
In honour of Saturn, a big divinity.
For a week, rules were suspended ceremoniously.
Music, singing, dancing and drinking
Prevailed then, just as they do now,
Under the christian name of Carnival.
Christmas and Kalends share a commonality:
The birth of a new year, in Roman antiquity;
And the birth of a child, in Roman christianity.
The winds of time change constantly.
Christmas is not what it used to be.
It's now merely a shopping spree.
It brings happiness not to you and me,
But to the captains of commerce and industry,
That we don't see, perhaps deliberately.
The spirit of Christmas, which Dickens
And others wrote about eloquently,
Is lost forever to history.
CZYTASZ
Earth Poetry
PoezjaI'm a dilittante poet, as you will plainly see. But I'm versed in the language of science, and I'm alarmed by what I see. Yes, planet Earth is in peril, and the day of reckoning is near. So, I have turned to poetry, to share with you what I see, fr...
