Where Christmas is sold, people rush to buy a piece of it.

Merchants smile with money grins and plastic trees glow, unreal.

Only One hundred days left to buy those gifts the TV says –

we dare not do without or children must have, but why?

In desperation we ask them, those so special little people.

What do you want Santa to bring? Advertisers dream, my despair.

 

Long gone those days of giving, hand made, with love and care,

a horse of corks, a knitted lamb, a cot, lavender bags or bookends. Simple

things, tokens of love; a mirror of those given

long ago, in a rustic stable; there was no room else where.

A mirror of a gift, so precious, that it changed the world.

Yet now this is almost lost to market share and glitz.

 

Still Christmas lives, where people understand,

where people are real, and mind not how they show it.

Not fettered by worldly things, tied down to earthly matters.

Where they know sharing.  Where those with little, give.

And what of Christmas sold? Its still the same, some people want it.

I am happy to have found peace in a place where Christmas lives.

 

David Garlick, Puerto Vallarta, December. 1996