The malls are decked with plastic holly,
Poor Santa (somehow) still looks jolly,
And every year the season starts more early;
The stores are jammed -- the usual crowd,
The Christmas tunes are playing loud,
And every year the weather gets more squirrely.
The Christmas stuff's been on display
(It seems) forever and a day,
And maybe this would only be amusing --
The shoppers dashing store to store
To buy, frenetic, ever more --
If it weren't for the world that we're abusing.
Pollution, strip mines, old-growth trees
Cut down and sent to factories
(In China) where they make the crap we're buying;
Perhaps this seems a daunting task,
But -- Santa -- all I really ask
For Christmas, is an Earth that isn't frying.
There's plastic reindeer, plastic snow
And plastic icicles that glow
(To make the yard look Christmassy and nice);
While CO2 fills up the skies,
The worldwide temperatures all rise,
And soon the North Pole won't have any ice.
And real snow melts away in spring,
But yet another plastic thing
Takes hundreds of years longer (if at all);
Though we can change things -- if we hurry --
It needs to be a bigger worry
Than getting up the Christmas stuff in fall.
(Extrapolating these two trends
Right out to their eventual ends --
Assuming no world-saving new endeavor --
I forecast a dystopia
Like some inverted Narnia
Where it is always Christmas -- winter, never.)
Background on An Advent Canticle:
In December 2012, I wrote a series of 25 poems in total (one for each day of December 1-24, plus a Prelude) and posted each one here on Daily Kos as I completed it. The poems dealt with common Christmas themes, as well as with issues highly relevant to Daily Kos readers: commercialism, climate change, and interfaith dialogue, among others. The wonderful feedback and support I received from Kossacks was a big part of what kept me going throughout this project!
It was suggested that I repost them on Daily Kos as a yearly event, and after some thought, I've decided to do so. (If you want to read them all, they're archived here; scroll down to the bottom.) Enjoy!