E. A. Brininstool’s, “Christmas Week in Sagebrush” appeared in his 1914 book, Trail Dust of a Maverick. The poem, as many cowboy genre poems do, offers a delightful, rhythmic cadence in cowboy dialect, dramatizing the small town of Sagebrush as it fills with the cowboys and their families and friends during the week of Christmas.

First Stanza: “It is Christmas week in Sagebrush, and the old town's only store”

The speaker first focuses on the “old town’s only store,” which is doing a booming business this week, so big that it’s never seen “sence it was opened, such a run o’ trade before.” All the ranchers in the vicinity have come into town to spend their “dinero.”

And they will not return home until they have spent every cent. They won’t forget their children on this shopping extravaganza as they are “Buyin' gim-cracks for the young'uns to put on the Christmas tree.”