Merry Christmas and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is December 25th, Christmas Day in the Morning, 2003.

Though I am not recording these poems on Christmas Day, if you are listening to these poems on Christmas Day,

let me thank you on behalf of all of us here at Goldberry that we get to come into your

home or car or tent on the Appalachian Trail. I don't know, it means a lot that you

come back to the daily poem over and over and have made us a part of your life.

And it really makes the work that we put in worth it, rewarding.

So thank you and a very merry Christmas to you all.

Today, two poems about the difficulty and rewards of being hopeful at Christmas time. The first is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that was turned into a familiar Christmas carol.

It's called the Christmas bells.

The carol is often known by the poem's first line.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day.

You can find some fantastic renditions of that Christmas Carol by anybody and everybody.

Some of my favorites are Johnny Cash, counting crows.

I'm sure you have others.

If you happen to be on a substack, I would love to hear who performs some of your favorite versions of this song.

But here is the poem that started it all by a Longfellow who had lived a difficult life, but to his credit,

and I imagine with God's help, bore up under some very real sadnesses and managed still to be

a hopeful and a joyful man,

who was, by all accounts, warm and kind and full of faith to his dying day.

Here is Christmas bells.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, goodwill to men, and thought how, as the day had come, the bell-frees of all Christendom had rolled along the unbroken song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.

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