Greetings from the Porch,

Merry Christmas! Don't forget: Christmas is a season that lasts twelve days, so may you celebrate well and fully.

• Phil Cotnoir revisits Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and praises its ability to portray a wondrous world: "The stuff of ordinary creation can shine and shimmer with a supernatural radiance."

• Daniel Fitzpatrick considers Christmas to be a gratuitous waste of time: "By our wastes, our outpouring of time and energy and substance, we indicate what we find holy, either to our salvation or perdition."

• Robert Cairns looks at a 1940s film, The Reckless Moment, as a Christmas movie: "When I think about Mrs. Harper’s longing for her husband’s return, I am reminded of Norman Rockwell’s Christmas art. There is a naïve sincerity to Rockwell’s scenes of happy, smiling families surrounded by bright Christmas iconography–a feeling that is sharply felt by its absence in the film."

• Benjamin Myers finds himself to be Scrooge-like all too often: "I am trying to write an essay about A Christmas Carol, but students and colleagues keep interrupting. They pop in to ask about classes, committee work, last night’s Thunder game. I don’t have time to talk. I’m trying to write about what is wrong with Ebenezer Scrooge, but instead I am just getting grumpy."

• Michial Farmer ponders Christmas memories and the passing of time: "I wonder, in retrospect, if they spent much of the morning communally engaging in the memory exercise that I’m performing here, and if they were more successful at it than I have been. Because what do adults do when they get together with people they knew before they were adults? They talk about the world that has vanished, the Garden of Eden that time has expelled them from."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about Christmas.

Plough published a new series of six poems by Wendell Berry. They form a lovely series. Here are two:

Only when you have the language for it
can you imagine it. Only when you can imagine it
can you know that it is real:
the angel alight with glory walking
among the shepherds half asleep in their watching.

. . .

The empire of money, war, and fire
cuts across the land.

There are in the same country
shepherds watching their flocks.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro