It was interesting to see how they took the proposal to drop that
Christmas from the calendar there in Old Trail Town. It was so eminently
a sensible thing to do, and they all knew it. Oh, every way they looked
at it, it was sensible, and they admitted it. Yet, besides Mary Chavah
and Ebenezer Rule, probably the only person in the town whose
satisfaction in the project could be counted on to be unfeigned was
little Tab Winslow. For Tab, as all the town knew, had a turkey brought
up by his own hand to be the Winslows' Christmas dinner, but such had
become Tab's intimacy with and fondness for the turkey that he was
prepared to forego his Christmas if only that dinner were foregone,
too.
"Theophilus Thistledown is such a human turkey," Tab had been heard
explaining patiently; "he knows me--and he knows his name. He don't
_expect_ us to eat him ... why, you _can't_ eat anything that knows its
name."
But every one else was just merely sensible. And they had been
discussing Christmas in this sensible strain at the town meeting that
night, before Simeon and Abel broached their plan for standardizing
their sensible leanings.
Somebody had said that Jenny Wing, and Bruce Rule, who was Ebenezer's
nephew, were expected home for Christmas, and had added that it "didn't
look as if there would be much of any Christmas down to the station to
meet them." On which Mis' Mortimer Bates had spoken out, philosophical
to the point of brutality. Mis' Bates was little and brown and quick,
and her clothes seemed always to curtain her off, so that her figure
was no part of her presence.
"I ain't going to do a thing for Christmas this year," she declared, as
nearly everybody in the village had intermittently declared, "not a
living, breathing thing. I can't, and folks might just as well know it,
flat foot. What's the use of buying tinsel and flim-flam when you're
eating milk gravy to save butter and using salt sacks for handkerchiefs?
I ain't educated up to see it."
Mis' Jane Moran, who had changed her chair three times to avoid a
draught, sat down carefully in her fourth chair, her face twitching a
little as if its muscles were connected with her joints.
"Christmas won't be no different from any other day to our house this
year," she said. "We'll get up and eat our three meals and sit down and
look at each other. We can't even spare a hen--she might lay if we
didn't eat her."
Mis' Abby Winslow, mother of seven under fifteen, looked up from her
rocking-chair--Mis' Winslow always sat limp in chairs as if they were
reaching out to rest her and, indeed, this occasional yielding to the
force of gravity was almost her only luxury.
"You ain't thinking of the children, Mis' Bates," she said, "nor you
either, Jane Moran, or you couldn't talk that way. We can't have no real
Christmas, of course. But I'd planned some little things made out of
what I had in the house: things that wouldn't be anything, and yet would
seem a little something."
Mis' Mortimer Bates swept round at her.
"Children," she said, "ought to be showed how to do without things.
Bennet and Gussie ain't expecting a sliver of nothing for Christmas--not
a sliver."
Mis' Winslow unexpectedly flared up.
"Whether it shows through on the outside or not," she said, "I'll bet
you they are."
"My three," Mis' Emerson Morse put in pacifically, "have been kept from
popping corn and cracking nuts all Fall so's they could do both
Christmas night, and it would seem like something that _was_ something."
"That ain't the idea," Mis' Bates insisted; "I want them learnt to do
without--" ("They'll learn that," Mis' Abby Winslow said; "they'll
learn....") "Happening as it does to most every one of us not to have no
Christmas, they won't be no distinctions drawn. None of the children can
brag--and children is limbs of Satan for bragging," she added. (She was
remembering a brief conversation overheard that day between Gussie and
Pep, the minister's son:--
"I've got a doll," said Gussie.
"I've got a dollar," said Pep.
"My mamma went to a tea party," said Gussie.
"My mamma give one," said Pep.
Gussie mustered her forces. "My papa goes to work every morning," she
topped it.
"My papa don't have to," said Pep, and closed the incident.)
"I can't help who's a limb of Satan," Mis' Winslow replied doggedly, "I
can't seem to sense Christmas time without Christmas."
"It won't _be_ Christmas time if you don't have any Christmas," Mis'
Bates persisted.
"Oh, yes it will," Mis' Winslow said. "Oh, yes, it will. You can't stop
that."
It was Mis' Bates, who, from the high-backed plush rocker, rapped with
the blue glass paperweight on the red glass lamp and, in the absence of
Mr. Bates, called the meeting to order. The Old Trail Town Society was
organized on a platform of "membership unlimited, dues nothing but
taking turns with the entertaining, officers to consist of: President,
the host of the evening (or wife, if any), and no minutes to bother
with." And it was to a meeting so disposed on the subject of Christmas
that Simeon Buck rose to present his argument.
"Mr. President," he addressed the chair.
"It's Madam President, you ninny geese," corrected Buff Miles, _sotto
voce_.
"It had ought to be Madam Chairman," objected Mis' Moran; "she ain't the
continuous president."
"Well, for the land sakes, call me Mis' Bates, formal, and go ahead,"
said the lady under discussion. "Only I bet you've forgot now what you
was going to say."
"Not much I did _not_," Simeon Buck continued composedly, and, ignoring
the interruptions, let his own vocative stand. Then he presented a
memorandum of a sum of money. It was not a large sum. But when he quoted
it, everybody looked at everybody else, stricken. For it was a sum large
enough to have required, in the earning, months of work on the part of
an appalling proportion of Old Trail Town.
"From the day after Thanksgiving to the night before Christmas last
year," said Simeon, "that is the amount that the three hundred
souls--no, I guess it must have been bodies--in our town spent in the
local stores. Now, bare living expenses aside,--which ain't very much
for us all, these days,--this amount may be assumed to have been spent
by the lot of us for Christmas. Of course there was those," continued
Mr. Buck, looking intelligently about him, "who bought most of their
Christmas stuff in the City. But these--these economic traitors only
make the point of what I say the more so. Without them, the town spent
this truly amazing sum in keeping the holidays. Now, I ask you, frank,
could the town afford that, or anything like that?"
Buff Miles spoke out of the extremity of his reflections.
"That's a funny crack," he said, "for a merchant to make. Why not leave
'em spend and leave 'em pay?"
"Oh, I'll leave 'em _pay_ all right," rejoined Simeon, significantly,
and stood silent and smiling until there were those in the room who
uncomfortably shifted.
Then he told them the word he bore from Ebenezer Rule that as they had
feared and half expected, the factory was not to open that Winter at
all. Hardly a family represented in the rooms was not also
representative of a factory employee, now idle these seven months, as
they were periodically idle at the times of "enforced" suspension of the
work.
"What I'm getting at is this," Simeon summed it up, "and Abel Ames,
here, backs me up--don't you, Abel?--that hadn't we all ought to come to
some joint conclusion about our Christmas this year, and roust the town
up to it, like a town, and not go it blind and either get in up to our
necks in debt, same as City folks, or else quit off Christmas,
individual, and mebbe hurt folks's feelings? Why not move intelligent,
like a town, and all agree out-and-out to leave Christmas go by this
year? And have it understood, thorough?"
It was very still in the little rooms when he had finished. There seems
to be no established etiquette of revolutions. But something of the
unconsciousness of the enthusiast was upon Mis' Mortimer Bates, and she
spoke before she knew:--
"So's we can be sure everybody else'll know it and not give something
either and be disappointed too," she assented. "Well, I bet everybody'd
be real relieved."
"The churches has sanctioned us doing away with Christmas this year by
doing away with it themselves," observed Mis' Jane Moran. "That'd ought
to be enough to go by."
"It don't seem to me Christmas is a thing for the churches to decide
about," said Simeon, thoughtfully. "It seems to me the matter is up to
the merchants and the grocers and the family providers. We're the ones
most concerned. Us providers have got to scratch gravel to get together
any Christmas at all, if any. And speaking for us merchants, I may say,
we'll lay in the stock if folks'll buy it. But if they can't afford to
pay for it, we don't want the stock personally."
"I guess we've all had the experience," observed Mis' Jane Moran, "of
announcing we wasn't going to give any gifts _this_ year, and then had
somebody send something embroidered by hand, with a solid month's work
on it. But if we all agree to secede from Christmas, we can lay down the
law to folks so's it'll be understood: _No Christmas for nobody_."
"Not to children?" said Mis' Abby Winslow, doubtfully.
"My idea is to teach 'em to do entirely without Christmas," harped Mis'
Bates. "We can't afford one. Why not let the children share in the
family privation without trying to fool 'em with make-shift presents and
boiled sugar?"
Over in a corner near the window plants, whose dead leaves she had been
picking off, sat Ellen Bourne--Mis' Matthew Bourne she was, but nearly
everybody called her Ellen Bourne. There is some law about these things:
why instinctively we call some folk by the whole name, some by their
first names, some by the last, some by shortening the name, some by a
name not their own. Perhaps there is a name for each of us, if only we
knew where to look, and folk intuitively select the one most like that.
Perhaps some of us, by the sort of miracle that is growing every day,
got the name that is meant for us. Perhaps some of us struggle along
with consonants that spell somebody else. And how did some names get
themselves so terrifically overused unless by some strange might, say, a
kind of astrological irregularity.... Ellen Bourne sat by the window and
suddenly looked over her shoulder at the room.
"If we've got the things made," she said, "can't we give 'em? If it's to
children?"
"I think if we're going to omit, we'd ought to omit," Mis Bates held her
own; "it can't matter to you, Ellen, with no children, so...." She
caught herself sharply up. Ellen's little boy had died a Christmas or
two ago.
"No," Ellen said, "I ain't any children, of course. But--"
"Well, I think," said Mis' Jane Moran, "that we've hit on the only way
we could have hit on to chirk each other up over a hard time."
"And get off delicate ourselves same time," said Buff Miles. From the
first Buff had been advocating what he called "an open Christmas," and
there were those near him at the meeting to whom he had confided some
plan about "church choir Christmas carol serenades," which he was loath
to see set at naught.