Reading poetry on Christmas might not be a widespread tradition, but maybe it should be. With all the clamor of kids playing with their new toys, family members catching up with one another and basketball blaring on the TV, it’s probably a good idea to reserve a little time to yourself.

If it’s all getting too much for you, feel free to sneak off to a quiet corner and enjoy some of these Christmas poems. You’ll likely feel a little less stressed, and besides, the eggnog will still be there when you get back (hopefully).

“Christmas, 1970" by Sandra M. Castillo

Christmas can be a bittersweet time, especially when we’ve had to leave behind people and places we love. In this poem, Miami poet Castillo, who immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1970, considers a little girl experiencing her first Christmas in a new country, assembling an aluminum tree with her family. It’s not until the girl is an adult that she understands:


Even a map cannot show you

the way back to a place

that no longer exists.

::


"[little tree]” by E.E. Cummings

Legendary American poet Cummings could be inscrutable, with his penchant for idiosyncratic typography and his gleeful disregard for tradition. "[little tree]” is fairly straightforward, though; it’s a sweet and short poem about a child assuring his family’s Christmas tree that they’ll take care of it. Cummings’ depiction of childlike innocence is almost heartbreaking:

put up your little arms

and i’ll give them all to you to hold


every finger shall have its ring

and there won’t be a single place dark or unhappy

::

“Messiah (Christmas Portions)” by Mark Doty


National Book Award winner Doty is one of the smartest American poets working today, but his work is also charming and approachable. In “Messiah (Christmas Portions),” he writes about the working-class members of a choral society singing Handel’s famous work in a Methodist church. Doty finds beauty in their devotion, imperfect though their voices might be:

This music

demonstrates what it claims:

glory shall be revealed. If art’s


acceptable evidence,

mustn’t what lies

behind the world be at least


as beautiful as the human voice?

::

“Your Luck Is About to Change” by Susan Elizabeth Howe

Utah poet Howe tackles both the serious and the funny sides of Christmas with this poem, named after a message she received in a fortune cookie just before the holiday. She’s worried — her luck’s been pretty good so far. But she refuses to give up hope or worry about the future as she looks at her neighbor’s Nativity:


Their four-year-old has arranged

his whole legion of dinosaurs

so they, too, worship the child,

joining the cow and sheep. Or else,


ultimate mortals, they’ve come to eat

ox and camel, Mary and Joseph,

then savor the newborn babe.

::


“To Christ Our Lord” by Galway Kinnell

One of the best poems by the late Vermont poet, “To Christ Our Lord” imagines a young boy who has hunted a bird that his family is now eating as their Christmas meal. “He had not wanted to shoot,” Kinnell writes, but did anyway, and now “he ate as he had killed, with wonder.” Like much of his work, the poem is stunning and chilling, a beautiful look at religious devotion:

He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?

The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.


Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,

The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

::

“A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore


It just wouldn’t be Christmas without Moore’s famous poem, which has been a staple in American households since it was published in a small New York newspaper in 1823. There’s something to be said for tradition at Christmastime, and “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is one of the sweetest, most enduring ones:

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—


“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”