One favourite Christmas poem....

 This is One of my dad's  favourite Christmas poems was "The Ballad of the Christmas Star" ( Frances M. Frost) It was my dad's  last Christmas, in 1967, and he came home to spend Christmas. He wasn't well. But he loved being home. My mother read this aloud, at one point when we were all gathered by the fire. In the old house it was a roaring wood fire. I was very young, fixated on a Dancerina doll they had given me. It was a quiet Christmas and he died in the New Year. But I still remember  the warmth of that Christmas, and how everything was good and wonderful, even though his days were short.....It was still Christmas.

 "Above  the mountain's crest, the star against the blue

 blossomed; and on the breast of darkness, hemlocks knew

 The gentle weight of whiteness,

 the easy wind's soft sound that sifted the silver lightness

 across the drifted ground.

 Huddled within the grey barn's warm and weathered walls,

 the calves were restless, hay was sweet in the bedded stalls,

 but the horses whinnied, shaking their halter, seeing the star through the small window,

 breaking over the mountain's bar.

 Like an opening flower, gold upon the heaven's deep

 clear cobalt, as of old. 

 The drowsy mother-sheep, her lamb nuzzling by her side, lay in the dusky straw;

 the lamb tottered and cried toward the window, when it saw the great star lifting slowly

 Over the snowy sod,

 Over all creatures lowly, as over the lamb of God

 It burned once on a blowing Night....

 And the Lamb was still,

 watching that brilliance growing over the wintry hill." 

 Frances M Frost was born in 1905 and died in 1959, in New York City. She was the mother of poet Paul Blackburn.