holmes_minor | Mrs. Hudson's Activity and Poetry Page

Hello everyone! Mrs. Small-Hobbit and Mrs. Frankles have requested that I host a combined activity and poetry page for December, and indeed I am delighted to do so.

Mrs. Frankles also suggested that I borrow a tradition from our neighbours in the Netherlands. She was speaking of “Pakjesavond” which is celebrated on the 5th of December, the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas—or Sinterklaas, as the Dutch call him.

It goes like this: everyone is allotted one person to buy a gift for, and they must also write a poem about that person—the poem can send up the person rather! The gift must be concealed in a cardboard model, which again must relate to the recipient in some way—something to do with their job or their interests. The Dutch call the models “surprises”, which is from the French and pronounced “sur-prees-suhs”.

You can see some excellent examples of these surprises in this article.

Now, naturally we do not expect you to actually buy a gift and make a surprise. But we would like you to pick someone out of everyone Dr. Watson has written about—that includes Mr. Holmes and the doctor himself, and indeed me—and think of:

a suitable gift

a suitable surprise

and write a poem about them

Though you don’t have to do all three options yourself! You can choose to do just one or two of them. Mrs. Small-Hobbit has suggested that you label your comment with the name of your “recipient”, then if you haven’t filled in all the options, other participants can reply to your comment with their thoughts. Or even suggest alternatives!

Feel free to be as wildly creative about these gifts as you like. And the poem can be a simple piece of doggerel but if you are feeling more ambitious, here is the usual list of poetry forms:

221B verselet, abecedarian poetry, acrostic poetry, alexandrine, ballad, barzelletta, beeswing, blackout poetry, blitz poem, blues stanza, bref double, Burns stanza, call and response, chastushka, cherita, cinquain, circular poetry, clerihew, clogyrnach, colour poems, compound word verse, concrete poetry, Cornish verse, curtal sonnet, débat, décima, descort, diamante, doggerel, double dactyl, echo verse, ekphrasis, elegiac couplet, elegiac stanza, elfje, englyn, enuig, epigram, epistle, epitaph, epulaeryu, Etheree, fable, Fib, florette, found poetry, free verse, ghazal, haiku, hay(na)ku, In Memoriam stanza, Italian sonnet, jueju, kennings poem, lanturne, lies, limerick, line messaging, list poem, lyric poetry, mathnawī, micropoetry, mini-monoverse, musette, nonsense verse, palindrome poetry, pantoum, Parallelismus Membrorum, poem cycle, puente, quatern, quintilla, renga, rhyming alliterisen, riddle, rimas dissolutas, rime couée, rispetto, Schüttelreim, sedoka, septet, sestina, shadorma, sonnet, stream of consciousness, tanka, tercet, terza rima, tongue twister poetry, triangular triplet, tricube, trine, triolet, Tyburn, villanelle, xenolith

Ik wens jullie allemaal een vrolijke Pakjesmaand!