Anyone expecting tinsel from Dave Bonta's "Secret Santa" gets something stranger. The title promises an anonymous gift-giver, and what arrives is a sixteen-line list of orders: sink, drink, gather, dress, remember, wear, go. The speaker never says who he is, which suits the title. You might read the poem as the secret gift itself, a slip of advice left by someone unseen. You might also read it as a person talking to himself, playing his own Secret Santa and handing out the survival tips he needs.
The advice starts in the dark. "In dark December, sink / into the memory of childhood / like a bog man into the peat." The simile is striking. Bog bodies are human remains preserved for centuries in peat, so childhood memory becomes something that holds a person, keeps him intact, and is also faintly deathly. The line break after "sink" makes the reader drop a little too, before the next line catches us. Nostalgia here is a pull as well as a comfort.
Then the poem turns Christmas inside out. The speaker tells us to "gather all your small griefs, / your long-bearded regrets / & grotesque humiliations, / dress them in red & set / them to hammering." Those regrets with their long beards look like Santa Claus, and the hammering suggests his workshop. The poem makes an unlikely proposal: put your embarrassments to work, as if they were elves, and let them produce something. The adjectives matter. "Small" griefs sit beside "long-bearded" regrets, and the plain word "small" sets off the heavy Latinate "grotesque humiliations." Private shame is both trivial and monstrous, and the poem admits it is both.
The sharpest moment comes at the midpoint: "This is / the season of fresh starts / & the slaughter of innocents." The line break after "This is" leaves the sentence hanging, and what follows pairs two phrases that should not sit together. "Slaughter of innocents" recalls the biblical massacre of the children by Herod, which the Christian calendar remembers a few days after Christmas. Bonta never explains the allusion. He sets the greeting-card phrase "fresh starts" against it and lets the clash stand. The mood is dark, but the delivery is flat and unshowy, which makes it more unsettling.
Then the poem veers into the kitchen. "Remember to cut air holes / in the top crust & don't stint / on butter. Wear sensible boots." After the massacre, we get pastry and footwear. The shift is funny, and I think it is also the poem's main idea. The speaker's remedy for a dark season is practical: bake properly, be generous, dress for the weather. Even the air holes work on two levels, since steam needs somewhere to escape and so do the feelings the poem has been piling up. That reading is my inference, but the placement just after the buried bog man invites it.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its music comes from short, blunt sentences and a lot of monosyllables ("Drink too much & sing"). The ampersands replace "and" throughout, giving the page a hurried, jotted-down look, like a note scribbled for a friend. The enjambment is quietly clever, with phrases like "set / them to hammering" and "don't stint / on butter" broken at the moment of action. The imperative mood holds everything together, so the poem reads like a recipe for getting through winter.
The ending opens outward: "Go out into the long night / & learn the names of the stars." After all the indoor business of memory, shame and baking, the speaker sends us outside. The "long night" is darkness again, but now it is something to walk into, and the task is to name what is in it. Naming is a gentle act of understanding, and the poem ends on that rather than on a neat consolation.
That is where the poem earns its significance. It refuses both easy cheer and easy gloom. It admits that the holiday season stirs up old pain, then answers with a mix of mischief, cooking and curiosity. For a reader our age, the lesson is unusually practical: you can't skip the dark, but you can dress it up, get on with ordinary tasks, and look up.