Our call for submissions for the January 2024 issue is about "personal" holidays which do not get on official calendars and probably don't get you a day off from work or cards and gifts. But I thought of how Robert Frost sent out Christmas poem “cards” from 1929 to 1962.
Each year, Frost would select a poem and often write an original piece for the occasion. he sent them to some friends and loved ones. Later they went out to his publisher’s friends and loved ones. If you were lucky enough to be on that list and still have them, they are collectors’ items.
They began as just his way to honor the winter season with a poem. One poem used was "Christmas Trees." (an excerpt below)
...He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn't thought of them as Christmas trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon...
Frost, 1929 (by Doris Ulmann, national Portrait Gallery)
Joseph Blumenthal headed Spiral Press during those years. Without Frost's knowledge, while working on an edition of Frost’s poetry in 1929, he printed 250 copies for friends and colleagues of “Christmas Trees.” When the poet saw the publication, his first response was not to sue him but to request a few copies to send out to his own family members. And so, the annual tradition was born.
The last Christmas mailing contained "The Prophets Really Prophesy as Mystics, the Commentators Merely by Statistics” which went out with 16,555 copies.
The collection would feature other classic poems by Frost, including “Birches,” “A Boy’s Will,” and “The Wood-Pile”
"Christmas Trees" is no Hallmark greeting card, but it ends with this Christmas wish:
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you here with a Merry Christmas.
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