The Christmas Poems

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), living in the hills of the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. In the early 1980s, I noticed that from some of my writing came a special sort of cadence and play on sound. This led me to dabble in poetry by 1982 or so. I didn’t date things so much then, so I am a bit at a loss as to the actual beginnings. I had nearly always had a special enjoyment of Christmas, an enjoyment that came more and more to have its center in the spiritual overtones of the Nativity story, and a growing sense of the incarnation in Jesus, which is the heart of the religious sense of Christmas. Those two threads of my interest came together in the late 1980s in terms of a series of poems nurturing the essence of Christmas. In one form or another, those continued through 2004, a body of devotional poetry that is the heart of this collection with a 2016 addition spawned by the work on this book. This last poem comes as I live on this ridge in West Virginia with my wife of forty-eight years, a pair of dogs, several cats, and now four ducks