Sun, not snow, poem

Where I live, we don’t have a “white” Christmas with a snowy landscape. It’s Texas and it’s generally sunny with brown lawns and near 80 degrees tomorrow! So, although I enjoy traditional Christmas rhymes and songs about our “winter wonderland,” we have to acknowledge that there are many places that don’t look like a Currier and Ives lithograph this time of year. So I’m always on the lookout for poems that feature the holiday with a twist. Here’s one of my favorites from Lee Bennett Hopkins’ anthology, Ring Out, Wild Bells.

Sunflakes
by Frank Asch

If sunlight fell like snowflakes,
gleaming yellow and so bright,
we could build a sunman,
we could have a sunball fight,
we could watch the sunflakes
drifting in the sky.
We could go sleighing
in the middle of July
through sundrifts and sunbanks,
we could ride a sunmobile,
and we could touch sunflakes--
I wonder how they’d feel.

from Ring Out, Wild Bells
collected by Lee Bennett Hopkins

*Just for fun, read the poem aloud and invite children to chime in on the word, “sun” wherever it appears in the poem—- to emphasize the contrast between the “sun” words and the usual “snow” images.