Newborn Jesus, swaddled and laid in straw at Bethlehem, provided the inspir­ation for T. S. Eliot’s great poem “The Journey of the Magi”. Published in Christmas 1927, it was written one Sunday morning after church, Eliot claimed, “with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin”. The three kings, driven by a force they do not understand, travel across the melting snow of Judaea until they come to the manger. Few poems conjure so hauntingly the miracle birth. In old age, however, Eliot found the “patently commercial” aspects of Christmas hard to bear. In “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”, written in 1954, he captures the child’s excitement of present-opening as well as a waning Christian observance caused by, amon