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It’s the birthday of the poet W. D. (William DeWitt) Snodgrass, born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania (1926). He started writing poetry at a time when the poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had persuaded most poets writing in English that poetry should be full of imagery and symbols and allusions to mythology, but that it shouldn’t contain any obviously personal details.

…helped inspire a whole new school of poetry…

But while Snodgrass was studying poetry at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the early 1950s, his marriage began to fall apart, and he couldn’t help but write about it in his poems. He showed some of these personal poems to his teacher, the poet Robert Lowell, but Lowell didn’t like them.

Snodgrass kept working on the poems for the next few years, while he took a variety of teaching jobs. He eventually sent the revised drafts to Robert Lowell again, and this time Lowell thought they were amazing. They even influenced Lowell’s decision to start writing personal poems of his own. Lowell helped Snodgrass get his first poetry collection published, and it came out in 1959, called Heart’s Needle. It was Snodgrass’s first book, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Snodgrass’s work helped inspire a whole new school of poetry in which American poets began to write openly about their personal lives for the first time in decades. Snodgrass has since been called one of the founders of confessional poetry, but he said, “The term confessional seems to imply either that I’m concerned with religious matters (I am not) or that I’m writing some sort of bedroom memoir (I hope I’m not).”

But in defense of writing personal poems, Snodgrass said, “The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. … If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this reality, his mind will be less than alive. So will his words.”

Today is Christmas Day. About 96 percent of Americans say that they celebrate Christmas in one way or another; but Christians didn’t start celebrating Christmas until the fourth century A.D. Apparently, the earliest Christians weren’t nearly as interested in Jesus’ birth as they were in his resurrection from the dead. Historians believe that the Gospel of Mark was the first Gospel to be written about Jesus, around 50 A.D., and it doesn’t even mention Jesus’ birth. It starts with his adult baptism.

… first mention of a Nativity feast appears in a Roman document from 354 A.D….

Only the Gospels of Luke and Matthew tell the story of Jesus’ birth, and they give slightly different accounts. In the Gospel of Luke, an angel appears to Mary to tell her that she will give birth to the Son of God. In the Gospel of Matthew, it is Joseph who learns in a dream that Mary is pregnant with the Son of God.

The Gospel of Luke tells the story of how Mary and Joseph went to the city of Bethlehem because of the Roman census, and since there was no room at the inn, they were forced to take shelter in the barn, where Jesus was born, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. The Gospel of Matthew tells how a group of wise men go to find the baby that has been prophesized as the future king of the Jews. They follow a bright star in the East until they find Jesus, and they offer him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Christian bishops only began to celebrate Jesus’ birth after a great debate over how human Jesus had really been. Some Christians believed he was just a spirit, with no body at all. But after much discussion, the church in Rome took the official stance that Jesus had possessed a real human body. Scholars believe that the church began celebrating Jesus’ birth as a way of emphasizing his bodily humanity. The first mention of a Nativity feast appears in a Roman document from 354 A.D., and that document is the first to list December 25 as his official birthday.

No one knows exactly why the date of December 25th was chosen, but it was probably because December 25th was the date set for a Roman festival honoring the sun god Mithras. It also coincided with the pagan festival of Saturnalia, which was widely celebrated throughout the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately for the church, Saturnalia was usually celebrated with drunken revelry. And for Christians, for the next thousand years or so, Christmas became the wildest party of the year. There were huge feasts and street parties that often led to riots. It was writers who helped turn Christmas into more of a domestic holiday. The poem “The Night Before Christmas,” published in 1823, was one of the first works of literature to suggest that Christmas should be focused more on children than adults. And Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol, in 1843, helped popularize the idea that Christmas should be about family.

It’s the birthday of the bohemian poet Kenneth Rexroth, born in South Bend, Indiana (1905). His father was a wholesale drug salesman, and Rexroth was offered a position in the business and that would have eventually made him one of the top executives. He spent a couple days thinking about that job offer and finally decided that he’d rather try to go off and become some kind of artist.

… I try to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life…

He wasn’t sure what kind of artist he wanted to be, but in the 1920s he was drawn to the artistic community in Chicago’s West Side, where speakeasies with names like the Dill Pickle Club and the Wind Blew Inn were full of politics, theater, jazz, and poetry. It was there that Kenneth Rexroth became one of the first poets to try reading his poetry to the accompaniment of jazz music.

He eventually settled in San Francisco, and California changed the way he wrote poetry. His early poems had been full of references to Greek mythology and philosophy, but after his arrival in California, he began to write poems about camping trips and fly fishing and love affairs, in addition to politics.

Kenneth Rexroth said, “I’ve never understood why I’m [considered] a member of the avant-garde. … I [just] try to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life.”

The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth came out in 2002.

…they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back…

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

It’s the birthday of Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). Austen is the only novelist who published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. Although she never got married herself, but she is best known for books about women who do get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: she told her fiancé that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.

…There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place…

Austen’s first two books, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), were great successes in her lifetime, but after that her readers grew less enthusiastic. Neither Mansfield Park (1814) nor Emma (1816) was as popular. It was only after her death that she became one of the most popular novelists from the 19th century. After the First World War, Jane Austen novels were prescribed to shell-shocked British soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them recover their sense of the world they’d known before the war. Rudyard Kipling said, “There’s no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you’re in a tight place.”

It was on this day in 1791 that the Bill of Rights was adopted by the United States, becoming the most sacred and debated laws in the history of our country. One of the people most responsible for the content of the Bill of Rights was a man named George Mason, who might not have even been a part of the process if he hadn’t been a lifelong friend of George Washington’s. He was a wealthy landowner in Virginia, and he liked to debate political ideas, but he wasn’t interested in politics because he shied away from public life.

…all people are born with certain rights, and that government’s purpose should be to protect those rights…

Then, when the Revolutionary War broke out and George Washington was named Commander of the Continental Army, George Mason reluctantly took over his friend’s seat on the Virginia legislature. When the Virginia legislators held a convention to reorganize their state government, George Mason arrived late and found himself assigned to the committee to write the new state constitution.

So it was only by chance that Mason wound up writing Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights.” Mason had read the philosopher John Locke as a young man, and he shared Locke’s idea that all people are born with certain rights, and that government’s purpose should be to protect those rights. And George Mason believed that the best way to protect those rights would be to list them in the constitution itself. Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights,” was the first time in modern history that a government specified the absolute rights of individuals.

While George Mason was working on Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights,” he took under his wing a 25-year-old legislator named James Madison. Madison was deeply influenced by Mason’s ideas about freedom, and he passed them along to his friend Thomas Jefferson.

Mason mostly sat on the sidelines during the rest of the Revolutionary War, but after the war he was asked to participate in the Constitutional Convention. The trip from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia was the greatest distance he ever traveled, and it was a trip he quickly began to regret. He found that he disagreed with the other delegates on numerous issues, especially slavery, which he thought should be outlawed in the new constitution.

But more than anything, George Mason fought for the inclusion of a list of rights in the national constitution, just as he had written it into the Virginia Constitution. But when he brought his idea for a bill of rights to a vote, it failed by a wide margin. And so, when it came time to sign to new U.S. Constitution, George Mason was one of the only men there who refused. His decision created quite a stir, and it even ruined his lifelong friendship with George Washington. The two men never visited each other again.

But Mason hoped that his protest would encourage an eventual passage of a bill of rights, and it was ultimately his former protégé, James Madison, who made the Bill of Rights a reality. Madison introduced the Bill of Rights into the first session of Congress in 1789, and he used Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights” as the model. Madison originally supported the adoption of 17 amendments, which was eventually trimmed to 12, of which 10 were adopted, including the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to privacy, and the right to a fair trial. George Mason died in 1792, a year after those freedoms and rights became law.

It’s the birthday of Frank Sinatra, born in Hoboken, New Jersey (1915). His mother was a midwife and a saloon owner, and she encouraged him to have big dreams as a kid. He spent a lot of his childhood sitting on the Hoboken wharves, staring at New York City, imagining how he could make a name for himself. It was his uncle who introduced him to music, and bought him a ukulele. He liked to sit on the curb at night, under a lamppost, and strum. He also liked to sing along with the player piano in his parents’ saloon, and occasionally one of the men in the bar would pick him up and sit him on the piano. One day, a customer gave him a nickel for a song he sang, and he decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life getting paid to sing.

…You want the voice, you take the name…

He got sidetracked for a little while when he got into the newspaper business, first working on a delivery truck and then as a copy boy. But one night he saw Bing Crosby sing in Jersey City, and that persuaded him to quit his day job and focus on music.

The first singing group he joined only let him in because he had his own car and could drive the group to gigs. The group won an amateur singing contest on a radio show with the largest call-in vote in the show’s history, and they got a regular job touring with another band. Sinatra eventually began working on his own, singing in bars and roadhouses. The trumpeter for Benny Goodman saw one of Sinatra’s performances, and offered to hire him as a vocalist for $75 a week. But he told Sinatra that he had to change his awful name. Sinatra said, “You want the voice, you take the name.” And so he got to keep it.

But Sinatra’s big breakthrough came when he joined Tommy Dorsey and his band in 1940. Their recordings of “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “This Love of Mine”, and “Night and Day” became the best-selling records ever sold at that point in history.

Sinatra later said he learned his distinctive vocal style from the way Tommy Dorsey played trombone, sliding from note to note and then holding long pauses. But after two years with Dorsey’s band, he decided to become a true solo singer. His first booking as a soloist was an eight-week run at New York’s Paramount Theatre, longer than any other solo engagement at the Paramount up to that time. His press agent was so nervous about his debut that he hired a dozen girls to stand at the front of the theater to swoon and scream, but it wasn’t necessary. Hundreds of other women showed up and did the same thing.

It’s the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918). He grew up a committed communist, and never questioned the party line. He even brought a copy of Das Kapital along on his honeymoon for pleasure reading.

…a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones…

He became a decorated war hero during World War II, promoted to first lieutenant and then captain. But after the end of the war, he was suddenly arrested by Russian authorities for supposedly criticizing Stalin in one of his personal letters. He was sentenced without a trial to eight years in a labor camp. He spent time at a few different camps, but eventually wound up at a hard-labor camp in Kazakhstan, where he worked as miner, bricklayer, and a foundry man.

His time in the Gulag changed his life, because he found that most of the men there had already rejected the Soviet government. In a strange way, it was only in the Gulag that Russians spoke freely about their political beliefs without fear of retribution. Solzhenitsyn later wrote, “You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.”

It was in the Gulag that Solzhenitsyn began to write seriously for the first time. To keep his work from being seized, he would compose on tiny paper scraps, commit his words to memory, and then destroy the paper. He was finally released from his labor camp on the day of Stalin’s death in 1953, and when Nikita Khrushchev relaxed censorship laws, Solzhenitsyn was able to publish his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

He went on to write a seven-volume history of the Stalinist labor camps called The Gulag Archipelago. The first volume was published in Paris in 1973, and that book got him deported from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont, where he tried to live as quietly as possible, rarely speaking in public. He lived there for 13 years, and then, in 1993, he was finally allowed to return to his homeland. He’s been living in Moscow ever since.

Solzhenitsyn wrote, “For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

It was on this day in 1917 that an accidental explosion destroyed a quarter of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the height of World War I, and Halifax was serving as an important port city for many of the ships carrying supplies for the battlefront in Europe. One of the ships coming into the port that day was a French warship called the Mont Blanc, carrying 200 tons of TNT, 2,300 tons of other explosives, as well as 10 tons of cotton and 35 tons of highly flammable chemicals stored in vats on the ship’s upper deck.

…almost 2,000 people were killed in the blast…

As the Mont Blanc sailed through the narrow channel into the Halifax Harbor, it collided with a Norwegian freighter. The collision started a fire on the Mont Blanc, and the captain gave the order to abandon ship. The crew piled into lifeboats and then paddled frantically away. Unfortunately, the fire drew a crowd of onlookers along the shore of the channel. The docks filled with spectators, trams slowed down, people stood at office windows and on factory roofs to see the blaze. Then, a few minutes after the fire had started, the Mont Blanc exploded.

It was the single most powerful man-made explosion at that point in human history, and there wouldn’t be another more powerful explosion until the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

The blast wave of water hit the shore, sweeping away buildings, bridges, roads, vehicles, and people. City streets split open into deep fissures. Houses, churches, schools, and factories collapsed. The entire city was showered with debris. Virtually every building in the city had its windows broken. About a quarter of the city, within a square mile of the blast, was completely destroyed.

Almost 2,000 people were killed in the blast and as many as 9,000 were seriously injured, many of them blinded by pieces of broken glass. Thousands of people were left homeless in the middle of a bitter winter. Volunteers poured in from the United States and Great Britain to help in the recovery efforts, and children who survived the blast were photographed for postcards to be sold to help rebuild the city.

Even though World War I was being fought across the Atlantic, Halifax was damaged far greater than any European city. It is the worst disaster of any kind in Canadian history.

C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland (1898). He said of his childhood, “I am a product …[of] books. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloak room, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.”

…You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me…

Lewis’s parents were Anglicans and took him to church as a boy, but he found religion cold and boring. He preferred pagan mythology: Irish, Norse, and Greek myths he read in storybooks. He created an imaginary country called “Boxen” and wrote stories about it. He said, “My early stories were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures — ‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armour.’ As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.”

He began teaching philosophy at Oxford, where he met J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a devout Christian and Lewis was an atheist, but they shared a love for mythology. They took a long walks around the Oxford grounds, debating the existence of God. Tolkien tried to persuade Lewis that the story of Jesus was a myth but that it had also actually happened.

The morning after one of those walks, Lewis went with his brother to the zoo. He said, “When we set out [for the zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.” He became the most prominent Christian apologist in the world. He recorded a series of lectures for radio, which were broadcast in England during World War II, and many people gathered around their radios to take comfort from his ideas in the midst of bombing raids. The lectures were collected into his book Mere Christianity (1952).

But he is best remembered for the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia, which he started publishing in 1950. Lewis decided to write for children, even though he never had any children himself and had never had any strong relationships with children. He wanted to give children what he had gotten himself from fairytales when he was a child.

C.S. Lewis said, “You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

On this day in 8 B.C., the Roman poet Horace died. He hated the chaos of Rome, and when his patron gave him a farm in the Italian countryside, he wrote,

“I prayed for this: a modest swatch of land
where I could garden, an ever-flowing spring
close by, and a small patch of woods above
the house. The gods gave all I asked and more.
I pray for nothing more, but
that these blessings last my life’s full term.””

It’s the birthday of cartoonist Charles Schulz, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). He was the only son of a St. Paul barber, and the family was extremely poor. Schulz said, “We used to eat pancakes all the time because it’s all we could afford.”

…who never gets to kick the football…

He learned to love newspaper comics from his father, who’d only had a third-grade education but who bought six different newspapers every weekend and read all the comics with his son. Charles went on to create his own comic strip, Peanuts, which appeared for the first time on October 2, 1950, and went on to feature characters including Charlie Brown, his dog Snoopy, and his friends Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and Sally.

What made Peanuts revolutionary was that instead of making the children cutesy pranksters, like most children in cartoons at the time, Schulz drew upon on his own childhood difficulties for material. Charlie Brown became the chronically depressed and unlucky child who never gets to kick the football, who always gets his kite stuck in the tree, and who never wins the love of The Little Red Haired Girl. Charlie Brown was the first character in an American comic strip to suffer anxiety and insecurity.