Friday, January 6, 2012

Goodbye to Christmas Trees

 

Ewes Taste Christmas - 2012
Photo by Amy LV


Students - it's that time of year when Christmas trees line the roadsides. When I was a girl, this was always a tough week. I'd want to keep the tree up for as many weeks as we could, and I fantasized about it becoming a Valentine Tree and a St. Patrick's Day Tree, and an Easter Tree. But one day or another, the needles would begin to fall, and out it would go...down the concrete steps, down the driveway, straight to the curb. And there it would lie, and there I would stand, kissing the tips of its needles and saying, "Goodbye."

If you have read this blog for a while, you know that I have a soft spot for inanimate objects. I feel what I imagine they feel. You can see this in Pumpkin and Christmas Tree Lot too. Today's poem is about imagining the feelings of something else, and it's about goodbyes. So if you ever imagine what something else is thinking, or if you have a certain type of goodbye that is tough for you, that might be a good place to begin today's writing. Too, this is a poem written TO something, to a Christmas tree. Such a poem is called a poem of address. Is there anything you want to talk to? If so, then go ahead and address it in a poem!

You may notice that the first line of both the first and third stanzas match the song, "O Christmas Tree." This was a fun way for me to begin, by jumping into the words of a familiar song from the season.

Back in my girlhood days, I was comforted to know that our small town of Vestal, NY recycled old Christmas trees as mulch for town parks. Today I am comforted to know that our Icelandic sheep happily munch our old tree right up!

If you haven't yet peeked into how third grade teacher Mary Bieger uses writer's notebooks and seen Arya's entries...there's a new notebook up at Sharing Our Notebooks, my blog devoted to writer's notebooks.

Joann is hosting today's Poetry Friday roundup over at Teaching Authors. Have a great time in the garden of poetry!

(Please click on POST A COMMENT below to share a thought.)

6 comments:

  1. We are able to take our trees to be mulched so feel they serve another purpose at least. Poems that show things addressed are such fun, can be serious and whimsical and yours today is a little of both. I love that sound and feeling of 'whispered warmth on winter nights'!

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  2. i always think "it's just a tree" and then i'm the last person willing to let it go, ignoring the hourly shed of needles on the floor in favor of thinking "it's got a few more days in it."

    ours comes down tomorrow. his name is edgar. he will missed. he will be mulched.

    lovely poem.

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  3. We've gone several years without a tree and I can't stand it anymore. I looked for an artsy artificial tree -- just something to hold the ornaments, really -- and what a waste of time that was. (Thank goodness I wasn't so in love with the idea that I also wasted MONEY!!) Decision is made. We'll have a live (or formerly living) tree every year, and we won't have ANY excuses not to have a tree next year!

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  4. I'm soooo behind on my blog reading! Love the poem. It's always so sad to take the tree down, isn't it?

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  5. I like this. My Christmas tree for the past couple of years has been a tiny, fake one as my dogs like to pee on real trees.

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  6. We always go and cut our Christmas tree down as a family on Thanksgiving weekend. It is so fun filled with lights and an array of meaningful ornaments that we are sad to take it down at the end of December. But come New Year's day it is always sitting out on the curb - marking the end of another holiday season.

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