XXV.

While the Americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally,

they have almost created a species of it in the Thanksgiving story.

We have transplanted the Christmas story from England, while the

Thanksgiving story is native to our air; but both are of Anglo-Saxon

growth. Their difference is from a difference of environment; and the

Christmas story when naturalized among us becomes almost identical in

motive, incident, and treatment with the Thanksgiving story. If I were

to generalize a distinction between them, I should say that the one dealt

more with marvels and the other more with morals; and yet the critic

should beware of speaking too confidently on this point. It is certain,

however, that the Christmas season is meteorologically more favorable to

the effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from a

prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The longer, darker, and colder

nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all manner

of signs and portents; while they seem to present a wider field for the

intervention of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. The dreams of

elderly sleepers at this time are apt to be such as will effect a lasting

change in them when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, and

grasping habits of a lifetime, and reconciling them to their sons,

daughters, and nephews, who have thwarted them in marriage; or softening

them to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have trampled

upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth; and generally disposing them to

a distribution of hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly

reception of gentlemen with charity subscription papers.

Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer exciting

difficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather quickly round the

steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them, preparatory to their

discovery and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight weather is

also very suitable for encounter with murderers and burglars; and the

contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotes

the gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in love

and marriage. In the region of pure character no moment could be so

available for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, or

savagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the

purpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helping

the author out with his plot. Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines,

or Pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the

dens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber,

and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspicious looking

entertainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting their way out;

or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunk

exhausted, and finding it broad day and the good peasants whom they had

so unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them.

We need not point out the superior advantages of the Christmas season for

anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, of the Arctic

explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian exile;

there is no time so good for the use of this material; and ghosts on

shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own logging

camps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, after

quarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and is

moved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in the

mining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardened

reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother’s doughnuts, and

breathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the

little brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him from

heaven; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes on

the butts of their revolvers.

It has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective; and here,

already, we have a touch in the Americanized Christmas story of the

moralistic quality of the American Thanksgiving story. This was seldom

written, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader; it was meant

to entertain him, of course; but it was meant to edify him, too, and to

improve him; and some such intention is still present in it. I rather

think that it deals more probably with character to this end than its

English cousin, the Christmas story, does. It is not so improbable that

a man should leave off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that he

should leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; that he should conquer

his appetite as that he should instantly change his nature, by good

resolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutions

in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other.

Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama and

simpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rarely has it dealt

with the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or the

intervention of angels. The weather being so much milder at the close of

November than it is a month later, very little can be done with the

elements; though on the coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be,

very usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more restricted in its

range; the scene is still mostly in New England, and the characters are

of New England extraction, who come home from the West usually, or New

York, for the event of the little drama, whatever it may be. It may be

the reconciliation of kinsfolk who have quarrelled; or the union of

lovers long estranged; or husbands and wives who have had hard words and

parted; or mothers who had thought their sons dead in California and find

themselves agreeably disappointed in their return; or fathers who for old

time’s sake receive back their erring and conveniently dying daughters.

The notes are not many which this simple music sounds, but they have a

Sabbath tone, mostly, and win the listener to kindlier thoughts and

better moods. The art is at its highest in some strong sketch of Rose

Terry Cooke’s, or some perfectly satisfying study of Miss Jewett’s, or

some graphic situation of Miss Wilkins’s; and then it is a very fine art.

But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, for

the reader’s emotions, as well as his morals. It is inclined to be

rather descriptive. The turkey, the pumpkin, the corn-field, figure

throughout; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against the evening

sky behind the low hip-roofed, old-fashioned homestead. The parlance is

usually the Yankee dialect and its Western modifications.

The Thanksgiving story is mostly confined in scene to the country; it

does not seem possible to do much with it in town; and it is a serious

question whether with its geographical and topical limitations it can

hold its own against the Christmas story; and whether it would not be

well for authors to consider a combination with its elder rival.

The two feasts are so near together in point of time that they could be

easily covered by the sentiment of even a brief narrative. Under the

agglutinated style of ‘A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story,’ fiction

appropriate to both could be produced, and both could be employed

naturally and probably in the transaction of its affairs and the

development of its characters. The plot for such a story could easily be

made to include a total-abstinence pledge and family reunion at

Thanksgiving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration over a bowl of

punch at Christmas.