And the Light shineth in darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it. — John 1:5

Throughout the night, the cold drew close,
And wrapped our home in shrouds of frost.
Within eight candles lent us light,
Returning to us all we’d lost.

Around us, all our village slept.
Our children safe, their breathing slow.
Eight candles gleamed beside our tree,
Their flames burned long, burned low.

Then all fell silent round my house.
The snow shone blue, the shadows, slate.
You could almost hear the planet turn.
I stood alone beside my gate.

Behind me, those I loved slept warm,
Protected by God’s endless grace.
Below me lay the village streets,
Wrapped in winter’s chill embrace.

The darkness waned, the morning loomed,
Within my house, the fire grew bright.
Outside I walked on fragile snow,
And prayed for greater light.

As a child, I’d lived in dreams of stars,
Of Peace on Earth –life’s golden seal–
And This Night seemed, of all those nights,
The one when all such dreams were real.

Tonight I know this is not so.
The world is not as we would wish,
But as we make it, day by day,
And this the mystery and the Gift.

The candles whisper of His Gift.
The stars reflect them high above.
The Gift is given to us again,
That we remember how to love.

for Justine Van der Leun — Mill Hill Drive, Southport, Connecticut, 1990

God rest ye merry, gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
When we were gone astray
Oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh tidings of comfort and joy

An ancient carol from the 15th century. The first recorded version is found in Three New Christmas Carols, dated c. 1760. Note that the correct placement of the comma in the first line determines the meaning.

In modern times the comma slid from behind “merry,” to in front of “,merry” which flips the whole carol topsy turvy. The original sentiment is for God to keep you merry*** in the face of whatever suffering may assail you in life. (A kind of archaic “Have a good day”.) At the same time, the word “merry”*** itself has to be understood in its original meaning. [continue reading…]

[continue reading…]

One of the abiding delusions of the male mind is the belief it is actually possible to put off critical Christmas shopping until late on the 23rd of December. I am the apostle of this delusion. I take comfort in this false belief every year. No amount of actual experience ever shakes my conviction that it is not only possible to shop like this but economically prudent too. And every year this faith is tested and found wanting. Whatever I may save in last minute markdowns I pay for in this evening’s glowing and gut-wrenching angst.

So there I was waiting at the “Information” counter in the local Barnes & Noble in search of, well, “information.” I simply wanted to know if this gigantic repository of games, gags, cards, calendars, coffee, and, oh yes, books had a certain title and where it might be located. I was one of a small cloud of befuddled customers hovering about the source of “Information” and the service in the store at this hour of the evening on this last day was not exactly “crisp.”

Bluntly stated, the “information” staff of 2.5 employees had had it. Burnt out, tired, tried to the breaking point, they were still going through the corporate mandated methods of “helping” customers locate what they were looking for. At Barnes and Noble these days that means, as it means at so many other stores, a quick look-up and then a guided tour to the book the customer has requested, a hang-out until the clerk is sure they’ve found it, and then an inquiry of that person whether or not they need anything else. People have gotten married on flimsier relationships.

This mandated hand holding means that those needing a simple data-base query run and simply to be told “That’s under the author’s name in Philosophy over there,” tend to build up at the desk in hordes. And in these hordes on this night nobody’s happy. Add to this stituation people actually calling on the phone with “information” requests and you can see the slow steam beginning to rise off the assembled.

Your real need to know means nothing to the “information” clerks of Barnes and Noble. They must, MUST, comply with corporate protocol lest some corporate quality control spy find they are doing things efficiently according to the situation and fire them. They know they could make things run smoother, but they also know they can’t. I understand this and, most of the time, I try to hobble my impatience and irritability out of empathy for their plight. Working retail on this day is not a stroll through a heaven of angels wings, babies bottoms, and hot chocolate with teeny tiny marshmallows on top.

However, this was the witching hour of Christmas shopping for me and I was getting ticked off as my, MY!, evening ticked away. The store was crowded and shabby by this point. The lines of my fellow sufferers (90% fellow male procrastinators) were long and growing longer. You could feel their nerve tissues fray and almost see the sparks glinting where the nerves were touching each other and sizzling.

Just when I thought it would be my turn at last to get my measly little question answered and get my own personal guided tour to the book I needed the phone rang at the “Information” desk and the woman, who should have been MY GUIDE THIS INSTANT!, took the call. She listened and said, “I’ll see.” Then she turned and disappeared into the bowels of the store.

Finally peeved I couldn’t help saying out loud in a scathing tone as she departed, “Jesus CHRIST!”

Without missing a beat the man waiting next to me turned and said, “Well, that’s Who we’re here for, isn’t it?”

In the serious practice of Zen meditation, the jikijitsu walks behind the meditators in the hall with a keisaku, a flat stick. If you are having a problem with the depth of your meditation, your focus, you bow slightly in your Zazen posture as the jikijitsu walks by and he gives you a quick and solid rap on the shoulders with the stick. This snaps you into it.

In this case, this man’s observation snapped me out of it like a sharp whack on the shoulders from a keisaku. Snapped me out of my bitter mood and back into the reality of the Christmas season instead of the illusion of the bookstore.

“Thanks. Thank you,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. He is the reason we’re here. I needed that.”

We both laughed. I shook his hand and left the store and my remaining little needs behind. I’d just gotten what I needed.

Outside in the parking lot you could see the getting and spending still going on in the dark. Beyond the parking lot were the roads and the woods and the streams and the mountains all under a white shawl of snow. Driving back through the whiteness I realized I didn’t need to buy any more gifts for anybody. We all already have more gifts than we need or know how to use.

What we all need for Christmas is often the last thing we want — a sharp whack from a keisaku wielding jikijitsu focusing us to simply accept, at the very last minute, His gift.

AD reader Mark N. writes in this season to say:

“I have thousands of vintage wood block letters used first by pioneer printers who could never haul letters of large size in metal, so wood became the material of choice. These were commonly used up until the 1960s, depending on the printer. One way I use them is like this, intended to slow the reader down just a bit so as to offset today’s communications high-speed mode. Thoughtfulness takes just a bit of time, and so that’s the goal here. At any rate, May He bless you richly this holiday season.”

Mark N.’s gift:

In New England in December the cold does not come in on little cat feet. Instead, some mountain god of the great north woods throws open the door to Canada late one night. When you step out the next morning your scrotum promptly goes into hibernation somewhere around your armpit. The cold gets hammered down tight. And it stays that way. Until, oh, somewhere in the middle of March.

I’d come to New England after many years away and, in Seattle, I thought I’d packed well for the trip. I’d made a point to bring my very warm Seattle jacket. I stepped outside into the New England winter this morning and between the door and the car I knew, based on Testicle Retraction Velocity (TRV), that my coat had nothing to say to this winter. I might as well have packed and dressed in a Speedo. At least I would have been rapidly arrested and taken to a warm jail cell until my need for medication could be determined.

In the car, having cranked the heat to the fat end of the red stripe on the dial, my thawing reptile brain hissed, “Get a coat or die, monkeyboy.”

But where? I was only going to be here for a few weeks before going back to the temperate zone of Seattle. I knew that various stores around this township would have vast stocks of sensible and warm winter coats but I didn’t really feel like investing somewhere north of $100 in some multiple layered goose-down body blimp that would warm you even within fifteen yards of Al Gore. I just needed a warm and dependable coat at not too much money… $75 to $85 … that would get me through the New England nights without frostbite.

Then I remembered that this town has something that Seattle didn’t because Seattle is just far too “smart” to have one – A Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, the greatest thing to happen for working people in the United States since trade unions and, today, a lot more beneficial to them as well. This town had two vast Wal-Mart’s. It was bracketed with them. I set off confident I could get a temporary coat at an affordable price. Little did I know. [continue reading…]

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
–Eliot, Journey of the Magi

Small moments in long journeys, like small lights in a large darkness, often linger in the memory. They come unbidden, occur when you are not ready for them, and are gone before you understand them. You “had the experience, but missed the meaning.” All you can do is hold them and hope that understanding will, in time, come to you.

To drive from Laguna Beach, California to Sacramento, California the only feasible route takes you through Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. If you go after dark in this season of the year, you speed through an unbroken crescendo of computer-driven holiday lights accentuated by even more holiday lights. In the American spirit of “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” the decking of the landscape with lights has finally gotten utterly out of hand.

Airports, malls, oil refineries, the towers along Wilshire and the vast suburbs of the Valley put up extra displays to celebrate what has come to be known as “The Season.” All the lights flung up by the metroplex hive of more than 10 million souls shine on brightly and bravely, but the exact nature of “The Season” seems more difficult for us to define with every passing year.

For hours the lights of the Los Angeles metroplex surround you as if they have no end. But they do end. In time, the valley narrows and you come to the edge of the lights, the place where the houses stop. Then you drive into a dark section of highway known as the Grapevine. [continue reading…]

I’ve recently added the Disqus commenting system to New American Digest. I am aware of numerous negative aspects of Disqus as a company but it still offers a rich commenting application. Disqus will take illustrations, gifs, and embeds. It also has the ability to lend bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and other formatting options.

The Legacy commenting system will be left in place until commenting streams in various essays naturally play out.

Below, under the legacy comments, the Disqus system awaits. You can play around with it at Disqus Comments Are Now Live @ NAD if you like.

” And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”— John 1:5″

Deep inside the world’s oldest known building, every year, for only as much as 17 minutes, the sun — at the exact moment of the winter solstice — shines directly down a long corridor of stone and illuminates the inner chamber at Newgrange.

Newgrange was built 1,000 years before Stonehenge and also predates the pyramids by more than 500 years. [continue reading…]

And here is the video of arrival in Dnepropetrovsk without blur.

How old is this picture @HillaryClinton? https://t.co/r6vnthe4tL

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) December 19, 2022

In the defense of the indefensible couple, it would be much, much creepier to see the real unfiltered Bill and Hillary hovering over children in the winter of 2022. 

EVIDENCE? EVIDENCE YOU SAY?

[continue reading…]

Last night I had one of the most frightening dreams a man can have. I dreamt that someone, someone who hated me deeply, had given me a brand! new! computer! for Christmas. I woke up screaming, but the dream persisted.

A new computer! I could just see it. It had everything: a processor so fast that it was measured in googlehertz rather than megahertz, more ram than the entire sheep population of New Zealand, a hard drive bigger than the Great Plains, and a megaplex sized-monitor capable of displaying 2.5 trillion ordinary colors at warp six and with such a blistering intensity that your eyes boiled in your skull. A broadband connection so huge it could suck the Library of Congress dry in a nanosecond. The CPU was covered in sable. The keyboard fashioned from rare woods. The wireless mouse was surgically implanted in my finger tip so all I had to do was gesture mystically.

It got worse.

This Christmas puppy came loaded with Fritterware. It had Openfly OS, BrokenWindows Version 6.66, HomelessOffice 2020, Chrome Crunch, TurboSax, iEverthingEverywhere and Schlong. Ye Olde Paperclip was back as the host of my new computer’s “interactive” training program aptly named RageMaker. When I opened the box in my nightmare my first impulse was to rip open all my other presents in hopes that someone had given me a gun so I could just shoot myself.

Nothing is worse than a fully loaded new computer, and I’ve been using them for nearly 40 years. Setting up a new computer is like getting ready to French Kiss an elephant; you know it will be a new experience, but you know it won’t taste like Veal Cordon Bleu.

I presently own and operate three computers (One hopefully named “Power Macintosh.”) I hate all of them in a separate but equal ways. I am not alone.

Given the death-dwarf invasion of Windows 10 and the eternal retail desperation of Welcome to Best Buy Can I Help You Find Something?, I know that all over the world this holiday season, millions upon millions of people will be receiving new computers, and that those computers will truly be the “gifts that keep on giving.”

Those gifts will be:

• confusion,
• puzzlement,
• frustration,
• despair,
• disgust, and
• homicidal rage.

[continue reading…]

The spherical tree, the scattershot expressions, the faint undercurrent of anomie and alienation — yes, it’s our annual holiday dispatch from the family of Washington, D.C., lawyer Raymond Dickey, who has a decade’s worth of Christmases preserved in the archives of the National Photo Company. Their 1918 portrait, with an Army surgeon and a map of World War I Europe, is even more dire than usual.

A Great Madness Sweeps the Land There are no limits on extremes in greed, credulity, convictions, inequality, bombast, recklessness, fraud, corruption, arrogance, hubris, pride, over-reach, self-righteousness, and confidence in the rightness of one’s opinions. Extremes only become more extreme even as the folly of previous extremes wearies rationality. Imaginary sins are conjured out of thin air to convict the innocent while those guilty of the most egregious fraud and corruption are lauded as saviors.

No one man stops this, no one stops it alone. I don’t know if it can be stopped. What I do know is the more we remain peaceful, the more they will take. They’ve demonstrated their willingness to commit genocide, to remove those industrious people who pose a threat to their authoritarian instincts, so what do you think they’ll do? They will do anything they want because there’s nothing in front of them to stop them.

When I worked on the drilling rigs, I had a philosophy to it, that I’d keep working at something until something stopped me. You can’t believe how much I was able to accomplish simply by employing that philosophy. That’s the same philosophy that governs the government. When the laws get in their way, they change the laws. Trust me, some archaic piece of paper won’t stop them anymore than some rulebook would have stopped me.

Translation: The Constitution has ceased to have any authority in this culture and “Aristotle’s in the crapper. They’re up to the part on Ethics.”. Proceed accordingly.

“A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in a state and about the new island Utopia”) is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More (1478–1535), written in Latin and published in 1516. ”

UTOPIA BY THOMAS MOORE, is the source of a brain virus that will not die but will continue to kill billions. Let’s Review: Utopia by Thomas Moore was a novel, a fantasy, it continues to be so unto this day, but fools still believe in it.
Our Unbalanced World | Our utopianism says that there is a recipe for harmonious living which involves no reckoning with the ‘ghost in the machine’, which is scarcity. They are ideological fixes, coming from deep, dark, bottomless wells of ignorance. Communism, Nazism, Islamism – Liberalism. All are ideological solutions to the problems of scarcity, but they are all devoid of common sense and reason (this is, incidentally, Why Liberalism Failed).

“Other significant innovations of Utopia include a welfare state with free hospitals, euthanasia permissible by the state, priests being allowed to marry, divorce permitted, premarital sex punished by a lifetime of enforced celibacy and adultery being punished by enslavement. Meals are taken in community dining halls and the job of feeding the population is given to a different household in turn. Although all are fed the same, Raphael explains that the old and the administrators are given the best of the food. Travel on the island is permitted only with an internal passport, and any people found without a passport are, on a first occasion, returned in disgrace, but after a second offence, they are placed in slavery. In addition, there are no lawyers, and the law is made deliberately simple, as all should understand it and not leave people in any doubt of what is right and wrong.”

The “Professional” Christian is often soonest identified by a distinct whiff of the unctuous. Re: Max Luccado.

Welcome To The New Rome | You see it in this rather bizarre post at First Things. There are two main assertions made in the post. One is that racism, and the mythological concept of white supremacy, are the worst things possible. The other point is that it is the duty of Christians to purge those accused of these sins from the ranks of the political Right. To make this point, he piles on a guy named Thomas Achord, a headmaster of a private classical Christian academy, who was accused of blasphemy by the Left. A feature of professional Christianity is to not only abandon a fellow Christian attacked by the enemies of the faith, but to also rush to the front of the line of bigots taking turns kicking the accused. Here is the execrable Rod Dreher taking some self-righteous shots at Thomas Achord. Like David French, Rod Dreher never misses an opportunity to promote his own virtue. He is who Emerson had in mind when he said, “The more he spoke of his virtue, the faster we counted the spoons.”

Perhaps they will die in “crisis” but leftists in control of the United States can make the “collapse” last a long, long, time with those and the top living large right down to the impact. A bit too much of the rose-colored classes here. Better to take two with the last one being insurance.  Leftists Thrive On Crisis, But Die Out During Collapse Leftists have a tendency to exploit crisis and tragedy to shore up power and expand their numbers through fear, but there’s a problem with this tactic. If the crisis is fabricated, a tempest in a teapot, then they do very well; if the crisis turns into an actual disaster with real world consequences including financial decline, supply chain disruptions, shortages and civil unrest, they have no tools to deal with the effects other than mob action and looting.

What happens if they use mob action and looting when the rule of law is no longer a factor in a country with millions of guns? They will die, by the tens of thousands, as people defend their businesses and homes. The violent hordes we witnessed during the BLM riots would not last long during a collapse scenario where people are more inclined to use deadly force.

“When rule of law is no longer a factor. . . .” I’d say “from your lips to God’s ear” but an actual civil war in the States is too terrible to contemplate. Almost, I say “almost”, too terrible, but not as terrible as the lack of law and the calls for genocide of “the other.” The “Rule of Law”? It’s already failing and the pools of gasoline at our feet await only sufficient spark.

Adventures in the “T-Zone:” I love the ad squib for Camels of finding and fortifying and keep the T-Zone the place where ciggie pleasure can be found. I once would switch from Marlboro’s to Camels just so I could feel a little of that oldz unfiltered “death hit.” This continued until, at last, in 2011 I got a death hit and died. Upon returning to life ten days later I found I had quit smoking. A draconian quitting method to be sure, but dying really does kick the habit. The War on Tobacco Tobacco acts as a mediator between humans and gods, shielding the user from negative energies, and keeping his or her mind set on the divine cosmic order. Anyone who smokes natural tobacco or uses tobacco in other ways feels this immediately. Tobacco generates sharper mental energy, and increases focus. All life originates from the earth, and from water. But to progress from biological to psychical life, feminine energy must be balanced by the masculine energy of air, fire, reason, order and mind. This is where tobacco comes in; it aids the passage from biological, sensuous life, to the life of reason. 

The FBI had 80 agents colluding with Twitter to censor Americans.

Just imagine what the FBI is doing with Facebook (Twitter x 10) & Google (Twitter x 25).

In January, House Republicans must subpoena *all* communications between Big Tech and the federal government re censorship.

— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) December 17, 2022

One finds these endless predictions of Boomer dieoff to be tedious. Dear Sullivan, We. Ain’t. Leaving! So suck it up and take your AIDS cocktail. The Boomers In The Twilight Zone – by Andrew Sullivan In 2016, euthanasia came to Canada — but it’s gone much, much further than the US. The Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) program is now booming and raising all kinds of red flags: there were “10,000 deaths by euthanasia last year, an increase of about a third from the previous year.” (That’s five times the rate of Oregon, which actually saw a drop in deaths last year.) To help bump yourself off in Canada, under the initial guidelines, there had to be “unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions that patients consider acceptable,” and death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” — not a strict timeline as in Oregon. The law was later amended to allow for assisted suicide even if you are not terminally ill.

||As for the socially insane of Canada — The only “terminally ill” people in Canada should be all those that passed this legislation. They should be so ill we should not wait for them to “self-terminate” but help them to their reward at about 3,300 feet per second.

Yup, every day at the Biden Whorehouse is just another day of “Perverts on Parade, ”This is, without a doubt, the most openly sexually degenerate political regime in human history, starting, of course, with that disgusting old pervert at the top. Forget the power of that certain eternally powerless bunch who can ruin your life if you notice certain things, the Rainbow SA is rapidly taking a page from Ernie Röhm. The Gay Gleichschaltung is happening before our eyes. As for Kanye, I blame those coalburning, madness inducing Kardashians. Bruce Jenner, that basketball player, and Kanye all went insane, and all had a Kardashian’s claws in him. They’re like plague rats.

Robert Reich, the Death Dwarf of the Left, grunts out some dry coprolites of well-aged brain farts. That’s okay since he means less today that Keith Olbermann.  On free speech: from Robert Reich, Yale Law School graduate ||| But the more interesting part of Reich’s statement are those last two sentences: “This isn’t freedom of speech. It’s just dangerous.” Again we have the strange definition of “dangerous,” which seems to mean “anything I don’t like which could conceivably hurt the feelings of someone on the left, or anything with which I disagree and think is incorrect or misleading.” And even more importantly, we have the idea that speech that is dangerous in those ways – hurting someone’s feelings, or bad jokes, or “misinformation” – is not free speech.

A solid and useful way of saving marriages. Needs to be reimplemented with a special updating of attaching a “Thunder Dome” to the exit just in case the urge to kill one’s spouse persists after sleeping in a twin bed.  Biertan’s Matrimonial Prison In Biertan, the most important structure was the church, which is placed sturdily on a hilltop with walls that extend out into the surrounding countryside. Within the grounds is a small building with a room inside barely larger than a pantry. Couples who approached the local bishop to seek a divorce were sent to the matrimonial prison for a maximum of two weeks—six weeks according to some—to iron out their issues. The room was sparsely furnished with a table and chair, a storage chest and a traditional Saxon bed. The couple attempting to repair their marriages had to be share everything inside this tiny dwelling, from a single pillow and blanket to a single plate and spoon.

Biertan Matrimonial Prison

And yet it continues but without God, it is so doomed. Money, not love, drives this mutual hating society: The exes forced to live together after breaking up – They sleep in separate bedrooms, and even recently got a couple of cats to complete the set-up. And although their decision is unconventional, they are far from alone. A recent survey from British real-estate company Zoopla, seen by BBC Worklife, shows that a third of the 500 respondents who purchased a home with a partner and then broke up continue to cohabit. One in eight even still shares a bed.

Still Caesar, with all that implies. Not that I’m “rootin’ fur Putin” but that I ain’t rootin’ for the pervert parade that leads Ukraine in all the repulsive institutions of DCHOMO & NATO. Russia’s Separation From The West — Vlad has used the time from 2000 till now to reclaim control of the vast resources of Russia, which account for approximately two-thirds of all mineral wealth, in almost every category. And our idiotic sanctions have driven his minions to create internal alternatives to Western products. From the simplest to the most exotic. And no, the military might of Russia does not depend on four-nanometer chip technology. They build brutally simple weapons in brutally brilliant ways. To the point where we, in our sociological fever swamp, have fallen generations behind.

From raw materials to energy to floor-production, the West has stripped itself of its sinews. All in pursuit of the lowest labor-cost profit. Which, in times of peace, is foolish. In times of war, it is suicidal. We are now at war. We must now pay the price. Mark these words—the clock has run out.

Russia no longer needs nor wants the West. We have forced this upon them. They have willingly embraced it. Russia no longer envies the West. In fact, she despises it and all our kinky ways. And she is determined to never again pine for our approval.

Don’t get me wrong. Vlad is still a Caesar. He is an autocrat to be sure. Yes, he has to satisfy his Oligarchs, his Boyars. Every Caesar must. No, I don’t believe for a moment that he will be better than Augustus, when the world was at peace. For that was exactly when mankind had reached its nadir. Which is why the True Autocrat had to appear, to save mankind from itself (and not just from Caesar).

“Lenin…analyzed why the Paris Commune was defeated… His…conclusion was that the Commune had not shot…enough of its enemies. It had destroyed too few people, at a time when it was necessary to kill entire classes and groups. & when he came to power, Lenin did just this.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“In their correspondence, Marx and Engles frequently stated that terror would be indispensable after achieving power, that … ‘After achieving power, we’ll be considered monsters, but we couldn’t care less.'” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And all those maneuvering to gain this sort of control in the USA are salivating at the thought of putting us all to death. All of us. All against the wall. Yes, our children and grandchildren too. So if we are to strike we need to strike deep. But. . but. . . patience. . . counsels… 

But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
 Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.  — Milton

Yes, true that. Deeply and eternally true. But still. . . . but still. . . .

And so…
… Pause…
… and begin again.

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom Cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and Archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air;
But only His Mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am? —
If I were a Shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part, —
Yet what I can I give Him, —
Give my heart.