Prompt: Personal Holidays

December is a big month for holidays both religious, pagan and secular. Many people love these holidays and spend a lot of time and money celebrating them. But not everyone is a fan of these "official" holidays.

In the poem "A New Law" by Greg Delanty, he proposes:

Let there be a ban on every holiday.
No ringing in the new year.
No fireworks doodling the warm night air.
No holly on the door. I say
let there be no more.
For many are not here who were here before.

I wouldn't propose that radical of a change in holidays, but I understand the sentiment.

For this December call for submissions in the 25th year of Poets Online, we are looking for poems about personal holidays. These are the holidays that perhaps only you celebrate. They are not on official calendars but they might be on your personal calendar. Not birthdays, anniversaries, national holidays, or religious holy days, not even Festivus.

In Galway Kinnell's poem "The 26th of December" he marks the day after Christmas not as being connected to that holiday but as" A Tuesday, day of Tiw, / god of war." Not exactly what most people would connect to the day after Christmas.

He celebrates the short day by

"talking by the fire,
floating on snowshoes among
ancient self-pollarded maples,
visiting, being visited, giving
a rain gauge, receiving red socks,
watching snow buntings nearly over
their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits
of sunflower seeds the chickadees
hold with their feet to a bough
and hack apart, scattering debris
like sloppy butchers"

It is a short holiday, one day and in a season of short days. And when it is over, " Irregular life begins" again, as with many holidays.

"Telephone calls,
Google searches, evasive letters,
complicated arrangements, faxes,
second thoughts, consultations,
e-mails, solemnly given kisses."

Give us a poem about your personal holiday. Why do you mark the day(s) and how do you celebrate? (If celebrate is even what you do.)

Submission Deadline: December 31, 2023 Happy New Year!

Galway Kinnell was an award-winning poet best known for poetry that connects the experiences of daily life to much larger poetic, spiritual, and cultural forces. Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up in Pawtucket. A self-described introvert as a child, he grew up reading reclusive American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. After two years of service in the U.S. Navy, he earned a BA in 1948 from Princeton University where he was classmates with poet W.S. Merwin. He earned an MA from the University of Rochester a year later.

Of his first books, What a Kingdom it Was (1960), Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964) and Body Rags(1968) which contains the bulk of Kinnell’s most praised and anthologized poems. Selected Poems (1982), for which Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize and was co-winner of the National Book Award in 1983, contains works from every period in the poet’s career and was released just shortly before he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant. Kinnell released the retrospective collection, A New Selected Poems (2001), focusing on poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, and his Collected Poems was published in 2017.
Kinnell lived in Vermont for many years. He died in 2014 at the age of 87.