All For You

Christmas Eve and the rain
makes all the lights double up.
On the piano our village
is covered in cotton fluff and painted snow
and I wonder - why not sand?
It's all ceramic and glass but,
why not wood? And maybe the lights
could be candle-colored,
yellow and brassy
and gold. How bizarre
to put a tree in our living room.
Why not a stable
or a manger or a
shepherds staff and hay -
lots of hay, strewn about like pine needles.
We can put out oats and sugar
instead of cookies and milk
and in the morning The Baby
will be lying there with
presents stacked around him.
The Kings will bring them
and the Magi and the angel
will wake us up with his Gloria.
Hollywood never invented Santa,
children sit on the knees of Wise Men
in the malls. Maybe one live one,
and a few wooden ones standing
to the side. They tell the Wise Man
how hard they are trying to be good
like The Baby and they are given a stick
of incense candy when they leave
or some honey. We can still shop
at Home Hardware, have to buy
the props from somewhere - manger rugs
that look like desert, biodegradable hay
that won't choke the cat. We'll have
fluffy lambs, stuffed lambs, and wooden
ornament lambs instead of snowmen
because it's true there were no snowmen
in Bethlehem. We can gather around
Joseph for stories, and let Mary
bake the Christmas bread.
And every Christmas morning
for the next thousand years
we'll hold The Baby,
all wrapped and swaddled,
and say 'See. baby. This
is all for you.'