It would be the pity of the world to destroy it, because it would be next
to impossible to make another holiday as good as Christmas. Perhaps there
is no danger, but the American people have developed an unexpected
capacity for destroying things; they can destroy anything. They have even
invented a phrase for it--running a thing into the ground. They have
perfected the art of making so much of a thing as to kill it; they can
magnify a man or a recreation or an institution to death. And they do it
with such a hearty good-will and enjoyment. Their motto is that you
cannot have too much of a good thing. They have almost made funerals
unpopular by over-elaboration and display, especially what are called
public funerals, in which an effort is made to confer great distinction
on the dead. So far has it been carried often that there has been a
reaction of popular sentiment and people have wished the man were alive.
We prosecute everything so vigorously that we speedily either wear it out
or wear ourselves out on it, whether it is a game, or a festival, or a
holiday. We can use up any sport or game ever invented quicker than any
other people. We can practice anything, like a vegetable diet, for
instance, to an absurd conclusion with more vim than any other nation.
This trait has its advantages; nowhere else will a delusion run so fast,
and so soon run up a tree--another of our happy phrases. There is a
largeness and exuberance about us which run even into our ordinary
phraseology. The sympathetic clergyman, coming from the bedside of a
parishioner dying of dropsy, says, with a heavy sigh, “The poor fellow is
just swelling away.”
Is Christmas swelling away? If it is not, it is scarcely our fault. Since
the American nation fairly got hold of the holiday--in some parts of the
country, as in New England, it has been universal only about fifty
years--we have made it hum, as we like to say. We have appropriated the
English conviviality, the German simplicity, the Roman pomp, and we have
added to it an element of expense in keeping with our own greatness. Is
anybody beginning to feel it a burden, this sweet festival of charity and
good-will, and to look forward to it with apprehension? Is the time
approaching when we shall want to get somebody to play it for us, like
base-ball? Anything that interrupts the ordinary flow of life, introduces
into it, in short, a social cyclone that upsets everything for a
fortnight, may in time be as hard to bear as that festival of housewives
called housecleaning, that riot of cleanliness which men fear as they do
a panic in business. Taking into account the present preparations for
Christmas, and the time it takes to recover from it, we are
beginning--are we not?--to consider it one of the most serious events of
modern life.
The Drawer is led into these observations out of its love for Christmas.
It is impossible to conceive of any holiday that could take its place,
nor indeed would it seem that human wit could invent another so adapted
to humanity. The obvious intention of it is to bring together, for a
season at least, all men in the exercise of a common charity and a
feeling of good-will, the poor and the rich, the successful and the
unfortunate, that all the world may feel that in the time called the
Truce of God the thing common to all men is the best thing in life. How
will it suit this intention, then, if in our way of exaggerated
ostentation of charity the distinction between rich and poor is made to
appear more marked than on ordinary days? Blessed are those that expect
nothing. But are there not an increasing multitude of persons in the
United States who have the most exaggerated expectations of personal
profit on Christmas Day? Perhaps it is not quite so bad as this, but it
is safe to say that what the children alone expect to receive, in money
value would absorb the national surplus, about which so much fuss is
made. There is really no objection to this--the terror of the surplus is
a sort of nightmare in the country--except that it destroys the
simplicity of the festival, and belittles small offerings that have their
chief value in affection. And it points inevitably to the creation of a
sort of Christmas “Trust”--the modern escape out of ruinous competition.
When the expense of our annual charity becomes so great that the poor are
discouraged from sharing in it, and the rich even feel it a burden, there
would seem to be no way but the establishment of neighborhood “Trusts” in
order to equalize both cost and distribution. Each family could buy a
share according to its means, and the division on Christmas Day would
create a universal satisfaction in profit sharing--that is, the rich
would get as much as the poor, and the rivalry of ostentation would be
quieted. Perhaps with the money question a little subdued, and the female
anxieties of the festival allayed, there would be more room for the
development of that sweet spirit of brotherly kindness, or all-embracing
charity, which we know underlies this best festival of all the ages. Is
this an old sermon? The Drawer trusts that it is, for there can be
nothing new in the preaching of simplicity.