One Night Stanzas

Infiltrate with Christmas cards
Put a poem inside! Preferably not one of those cheesy Hallmark ones that rhymes ‘year’ with ‘cheer’ or whatever — a real poem, a good poem, one you like. Write it yourself or use someone else’s. Make it Christmassy, or not. Just give your rellies something more interesting to read than “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” for the millionth time!

Sabotage your Christmas crackers
No one likes those cracker jokes. I know it’s a tradition, but it’s a fairly lame one, right? Most Christmas crackers are really easy to sabotage — so fish those jokes out and stick a poetry quote inside instead (or as well, if you’re particularly attached to the cracker joke tradition). Suddenly instead of a painful groaning-fest at the Christmas dinner table, you’ll have an impromptu poetry reading.

Charades must die
Something else everyone hates about Christmas. No matter how good the stuff on TV is or how action-packed you make your Christmas day agenda, the ‘charades?’ suggestion always comes up, at the end of the night when everyone’s about three eggnogs past their bedtime. It seems the only thing to do, but it isn’t: I am totally sincere when I say that Poetry Consequences is way, way more fun. What is Poetry Consequences? Get a bit of paper, write a theme at the top (tip: make it either very vague or very silly) and then write the first line of a poem. Fold the paper over so no one can see what you wrote and then pass it to the next person. Everyone writes a secret line of poetry on the theme, then at the end, you unfold the paper and read the usually-terrible results. The siller or more pretentious your lines, the better. It’s potentially hilarious… and you don’t have to stand up in front of everyone.

Christmas poems suck
Have you noticed? I know it sounds uncharitable, but so many Christmas poems are kind of terrible… that, or used so often in Christmas adverts (Night Before Christmas, anyone?) that you no longer really think of them as poems. The solution? Write your own this festive season. I challenge you! Write a good poem about Christmas, please!

Give poetry a Christmas present
Once you’ve got past the mad shopping trips, present-opening and Brussels-sprout-gobbling, you get to the whole Christmas Spirit thing… Christmas is a time of goodwill to all men and doing good deeds, so get out there and do something good. Give poetry a Christmas present by donating a small amount to a great literary resource, project or small press — or just buy a poet’s book direct from that poet (or their publisher… just not Amazon!).

What are you doing to poetrify your Christmas?

(Photo by xdesx)