Answering the question:
What Do You Give the European Bureaucrat Who Already Runs Everything?

Ursula’s Green Christmas

’Twas the morning of Christmas! Awake before dawn,

Ursula put all her green finery on,

Her drndl and stockings and shoes were all green,

Her embroidered silk vest was a sight to be seen,

It was Aryan green, for the old solstice day—

What churls are the Irish, they stole it away!—

 

But no mind, for now Ursula wasn’t thinking of that,

But the dawn of green Christmas, and what presents she’d got.

There was one thing so precious, she’d asked for so late,

It was impossible, yet it would just be so great—

She silently slipped through the door of her room,

And a hundred green candles winked through the gloom!

 

The house all green candles! ’Twas just for today,

For they’d told all the commoners to keep warm that way,

Having no light or power; and it seemed only right

She should do it herself for a day and a night,

To show it was cheerful and it wasn’t insane

To go back to the Seventeenth Century again.

 

For Ursula knew that this Christmas was tough

For the commons—their wage was not nearly enough

To buy power or heat; and the wind wouldn’t blow

And the sunshine so faintly would come and would go—

They should know to seal up all their windows and doors,

And put lovely green sod down all over their floors!

 

She wished them the best, and crept through the great hall,

Where she knew the roof solar hadn’t warmed it at all

Since the Summer; peeked out through the mist and the chill,

Where her family’s wind turbine stood ghostly and still.

How nice they had money for natural gas!

How sad that so many should lack it, alas!

 

But then gas is carbon, and to come to the facts,

The tallow has carbon, that makes candle wax,

And Ursula’s political instincts had told her

That carbon is just in the eye of the beholder;

And she was just thinking of the Great Chain of Being

When she came to the parlor—and what was she seeing!

 

The fireplace mantel—her stocking hung there,

It was bulging with something—she stroked her green hair—

Cold were her countrymen, struggling through drifts,

But Ursula was burning to discover her gifts.

She drew in her breath as she reached for the goal—

“Oh, it’s just what I needed, a big lump of coal!”