Come Write Together with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

I’m sitting here in pre-dawn darkness looking at our Christmas tree. The ornaments on it span more than a century: fragile faded globes that belonged to my grandmother, a barely-hanging-together paper chain made by an elementary-school daughter, a 2025 wooden star someone left in the Poetry Hut yesterday, a flame-colored kayak my Christmas-loving mother bought me two summers ago in Old Forge, NY.

And a bunch of ancient, weird ornaments that at a painful time when I had to leave behind most of the ornaments I cherished and had gathered over many years, I bought ar Value Village. Tattered boxes of discards left over from someone’s estate sale.

But guess what, it’s possible to grow to love and appreciate strange old ornaments that must have meant something precious to people you’ll never know. Many things are possible in life. I keep reminding myself of that.  

Christmas 1963, by Joseph Enzweiler

Because we wanted much that year
and had little. Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he
kept silent too with our mother,
fearfully proud before us.

Because I was young that morning
in gray light untouched on the rug
and our gifts were so few, propped
along the furniture, for a second
my heart fell, then saw how large
they made the spaces between them

to take the place of less. Because
the curtained sun rose brightly
on our discarded paper and the things
themselves, these forty years,
have grown too small to see, the emptiness
measured out remains the gift,

fills the whole room now, that whole year
out across the snowy lawn. Because
a drop of shame burned quietly
in the province of love. Because
we had little that year
and were given much.

Click here for more information about Joseph Enzweiler. Today’s poem first appeared in 2004 in  The Man Who Ordered Perch, published by Iris Press. 

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My podcast: Words by Winter