Sharing

                              19th Century card; Australia

SHARING

Times may change; this card is quaint.

The child is pictured as a saint

Because she shares her Xmas goods

With a labourer working in the woods!

Yet some things just don't change at all;

Some live in a shack, some up at the Hall.

Let us think, today, of lives that are hard.

And remember this ancient Christmas card.

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OLD DAYS, OLD WAYS.

'Ettie Yeo' wrote these words for Christmas

Over a hundred years ago.

She had them printed on Christmas cards

And sent them to people she happened to know.

Ettie-Beatrice was her full name,

The Mother of my Mother-in-law,

And so Great-Grandmother to my children,

But somebody they never saw.

So changed the language and the feeling!

Words like these now don't exist!

But when I read I sort of fancy

That I was on her Christmas List.

She must have hoped that, in her family,

Another poet might emerge.

Well, here I am! No blood-relation,

But, in a way, two lives converge.

*