.
Woke Christmas
We dream of Christmas like we used to know,
With Santa Claus and sleigh rides in the snow,
Big families all together, super-sized,
But leftist thinking has metastasized
And each says, “Season’s Greetings,” like a parrot,
And Frosty’s a snow-“woman” with a carrot.
School bullies are excused for great unpleasance
And find their houses filled with loads of presents,
While straight and Christian children who resist
The rainbow flag are on the naughty list,
But they don’t merely get a lump of coal—
The policy’s much worse at the North Pole.
Against the parents’ will, what goes to boys
Are dresses, dolls, cosmetics, fashion toys;
Each girl gets any toy she wishes, other
Than what would feed her dream to be a mother.
For such is Christmas once it’s sacrificed
Its Happy Birthday wish to Jesus Christ
And Santa Claus works hard to hide the light
Of herald angels silenced in the night.
.
.
“Decrease the Surplus Population!”
“Decrease the surplus population!”
I hear our modern Scrooges say.
It’s preached all over every nation:
“Decrease the surplus population!
Defeat the scourge of procreation!”
Though God commands a better way,
“Decrease the surplus population!”
I hear our modern Scrooges say.
First published in The Creativity Webzine
.
The Christmas Party
How festively the spacious home
Shimmers with red and white and green
Like Independence Day in Rome
As lights and ribbons deck the scene!
The party guests all laugh and chat;
On cookies oven-fresh they fill.
They gather ’round (imagine that!)
A tree that towers like a hill.
Romance now saturates the air,
All couples under mistletoe.
The dateless guests don’t seem to care;
They’re swept away by joyful show.
In grand finale, caroling,
All burst in song and sing with might,
With “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!”
And “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night.”
Side by side, we watch the party
In the movie on our screen.
Community so bright and hearty
In real life never have we seen.
Who could we ever have that with?
Folks today don’t go out much.
Like Tantalus of old Greek myth,
We look, but we can never touch.
First published in The Creativity Webzine
.
.
Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland. His poetry has been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, Atop the Cliffs, Our Day’s Encounter, The Creativity Webzine, Verse Virtual, and The Asahi Haikuist Network, and his short fiction has been published in Nanoism and The Creativity Webzine.
You bore into the very core of a Woke Christmas in your poem of the same title with some excellent points. It is a grave warning to all parents out there whose children are bombarded with propaganda in a world gone insane.
You make excellent use of the triolet form to get a stark point across – but, my favorite is “The Christmas Party.” We have lost so much of the warmth and wonder of social interaction in this divisive world with loneliness increasing as a result. I love the way you surprise the reader in your closing stanza with the party being on the screen, as is the social norm these days. The stark reminder of today’s reality came out of the blue and hit me in the heart… a powerful and affecting poem that says it all.
All three poems serve as a warning I hope will open many more eyes to our sad situation. Josh, thank you! I hope the new year is a joyous and creative one for you. I look forward to reading more of your work.
Thank you, Susan. I based “The Christmas Party” on those Hallmark Christmas romance movies my mother enjoys watching every year. I wrote the poem when I realized that such a scene mostly exists in movies these days, at least in many places. “Woke Christmas” was based on the same movies introducing all kinds of woke elements.
I look forward to reading more of your work in the new year as well.
Josh, all three poems are moving — the first to anger, over the vicious war against Christmas that is now a permanent part of the political landscape; the second to dread, over the clearly expressed determination of our Deep-State rulers to kill off as many of us as possible; and the third to a gut-wrenching nostalgia over what the Christmas season used to be in the not-too-distant past.
Two lines are especially powerful:
“Of herald angels silenced in the night” and “We look, but we can never touch.”
Those lines drive home, with great emotional intensity, the anti-Christmas cancer that is metastasizing in the modern world. The only thing comparable was the savage Puritan attempt to abolish every trace of Christmas during the Cromwellian Commonwealth.
Thank you, Joe. I’m glad these were moving and powerful. I agree with your thoughts on the matter, except that I think assimilating Christmas into the woke Borg collective is even worse than outright banning it, which at least would have given it a kind of honor, like a man dying in battle.
Great poems all three, Josh. I especially liked “Woke Christmas” for its inventory of what the grinches on the left have stolen. Christmas celebrations that have not been deChristianized have been relegated to churches and private homes. And that’s the way those on the left like it.
Making it worse from my standpoint is that Hanukkah celebrations at a ton of public places were canceled this year — ostensibly for the protection of participants from terror attacks and stone-throwing. In America. In the year 2023. But these cancellations end up simply erasing Jewish presence and identity. The left will be very happy when they can similarly erase Christian presence and identity.
As for your third poem, I saw a lot of Christmas parties this year so they do still occur. In fact, we went to two. But they’re 100% secular and often focused on networking.
Happy New Year, Josh!
Thank you, Brian. I agree with your assessment of the left’s attacks on Christmas, except it seems more and more that they don’t even want us to have churches and private faith. Recall that during the lockdowns of 2020, the buildings most zealously closed were churches and gyms (the latter possibly because the Deep State doesn’t want strong men). Plus the left is doing its best to make churches woke the way they’re doing to Christmas, and they’re disturbingly successful.
Not being Jewish myself, I wasn’t aware of the cancellations of Hanukkah celebrations. It’s as if the left is trying to erase Jews in addition to Christians now that they have to suck up to the Muslims.
You’re right, the Christmas parties that do exist are neutered and nothing like what they show in the movies.
Happy New Year to you too, Brian!