This weekend is the Christmas Sunday School program at church. There are going to be bathrobed shepherds. There's going to be a children's bell choir playing a Christmas carol that will be totally unrecognizable. The kids will sing "Away in A Manger," even though the kids are sick and tired of singing "Away in A Manger" every year. It's going to be an absolute mess, and everybody's going to love it.
That's what Donald Hall is writing about. The beautiful chaos of Christmas. And the mystery.
This Sunday is going to drive Saint Marty crazy.
Christmas Party at the South Danbury Church
by: Donald Hall
December twenty-first
we gather at the white Church festooned
red and green, the tree flashing
green-red lights beside the altar.
After the children of Sunday School
recite Scripture, sing songs,
and scrape out solos,
they retire to dress for the finale,
to perform the pageant
again: Mary and Joseph kneeling
cradleside, Three Kings,
shepherds and shepherdesses. Their garments
are bathrobes with mothholes,
cut down from the Church's ancestors.
Standing short and long,
they stare in all directions for mothers,
sisters and brothers,
giggling and waving in recognition,
and at the South Danbury
Church, a moment before Santa
arrives with her ho-hos
and bags of popcorn, in the half-dark
of whole silence, God
enters the world as a newborn again.
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| Unto us a Child is born... |
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