Advent

My daughter wrote on an index card
Not Trash Do Not Throw Away (Please)
and taped it to the cardboard frame
of her empty advent calendar,
which for three years has sat atop
a bookshelf in her room, its foil-wrapped
chocolates long divided and consumed,

dark for her, milk for me. And though
I plead with her to clean her room
of all its useless stuff, I too
loved peeking into the calendars
my friends received each December
(I never once had my own),
all the tiny windows and doors

opening on so many little gifts.
What possibility! How lucky
they seemed, except the sorry few
whose treasures turned out to be cartoons
or Bible verses instead of candy.
We all want the tangible, chocolates
and toys, but also the anticipation

and then the memory of sweetness.
My daughter’s calendar shows no
angels, no wise men, not even Santa,
just smiling bears and a snowy house
aglow. What I keep, in the hall
beside our family photographs,
is the framed collage she made in school

of our old house on a hill. (The word
hill! is there in her careful print.)
She’s drawn herself in front, pink-haired
and legs in motion, but what I notice
most are all the extra windows –
she put them even in the roof,
so many little openings to joy.

*

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife. Since 2019, she has served as poet laureate of Georgia.