HOLIDAYS
I remember that we boys used to argue as to which was better, summer or
winter. Each season had its special charms, and each was welcome after
the other one had run its course. One reason why we were never sure
which was best was that Christmas came in winter and Fourth of July in
summer. There were other lesser holidays that counted little with the
boy. There was Thanksgiving; but ours was a village of New England
people, and Thanksgiving was largely a religious day. The church-bells
always rang on Thanksgiving, although usually we were not compelled to
go to meeting. Then, too, Thanksgiving was the day for family reunions.
Our aunts and uncles and grandfathers and grandmothers came to take
dinner with us, or we went to visit them; and we had to comb our hair
and dress up, and be told how we had grown, and how much we looked like
our father or our mother or our aunt, or some other member of the
family; and altogether the day was about as stupid as Sunday, and we
were glad when it was over.
Then there was New Year’s day; but this was of little use. No one paid
much attention to New Year’s, and generally the people worked that day
the same as any other. Sometimes a belated Christmas present was left
over to New Year’s day, and we always had a lingering expectation that
we might get something then, although our hopes were not strong enough
to warrant hanging up our stockings again. Washington’s Birthday was of
no account whatever, and in those days Lincoln’s birthday and Labor-day
had not yet been made holidays. We managed to get a little fun out of
April Fool’s day, but this was not a real holiday, for school kept that
day.
But Christmas and Fourth of July were really made for boys. No one
thought of working on these days, and even my father did not make us
study then. Christmas was eagerly looked forward to while it was still a
long way off, and a good many of the boys and girls believed in Santa
Claus. All the children had heard the story, but my parents always told
us it was not true, and we knew that Santa Claus was really our father
and mother, or sometimes our uncles and aunts and grandparents, and
people like that. Of course we hung up our stockings; all boys and girls
did that. We went to bed early at night and got up early in the morning,
and after comparing our presents at home we started out through the
neighborhood to see what the other boys and girls had got. Then there
was the Christmas-tree in the evening at the church. This was one
occasion when there was no need to make us go to church; and we all got
a little paper horn of candy, or a candy cane, or some such treasure,
plucked fresh from the green tree among the little lighted wax candles
stuck on every branch. All day long on Christmas we could slide down
hill or skate, and sometimes we even had a new pair of skates or a sled
for a present. Altogether Christmas was a happy day to us children.
Of course there were some boys and girls who got very little at
Christmas, and some who got nothing at all, and these must have grieved
a great deal; and I wondered not a little why it was that things were so
uneven and unfair. I know now that it was cruel that this knowledge
could not have been kept from the little child until he had grown better
able to know and understand. I also realize that even to my parents, who
were not the very poorest, with so many children Christmas must have
meant a serious burden both for what they gave and what they could not
give, and that my mother must have denied herself many things that she
should have had, and my father must have been compelled to forego many
books that would have brought him comfort and consolation for his buried
hopes.
As I have grown older, and have seen Christmas-giving develop into a
duty and a burden, and often a burden hard to bear, I have come to
believe less and less in this sort of indiscriminate matter-of-course
gift-making. If one really wishes to make a present, it should be
offered freely from the heart as well as from the hand, and given
without regard to Christmas day. With care and thoughtfulness on the
part of parents, almost any day could be a holiday to little children,
and they would soon forget that “Christmas comes but once a year.”
But, after all, I think the boys of my time liked the Fourth of July
better than Christmas day. This was no doubt largely due to the fact
that children love noise. They want “something doing,” and the Fourth of
July somehow satisfies this desire more than any other day. Then we boys
ourselves had a great deal to do with the Fourth of July. In fact, there
could not have been a real Fourth without our effort and assistance. As
on Christmas eve, we went to bed early without protest on the night
before the Fourth,—so early that we could not go to sleep, and would lie
awake for hours wondering if it were not almost time for the Fourth to
begin. We always started the celebration before daylight. The night
before, we had put our dimes and pennies together and bought all the
powder we could get the stores to sell us; and then the blacksmith’s boy
had a key to the shop,—and, anyhow, his father was very “clever” to us
boys. By the help of this boy we unlocked the door, took out the anvils,
and loaded them on a wagon. We got a little charcoal stove from the boy
whose father had a tin-shop, and with it a long rod of iron; and then we
started out, before day had dawned, to usher in the Fourth. We drew the
anvils up and down the road, stopping particularly before the houses
where we knew that we would not be welcome. Then we unloaded one anvil,
turned it upside down, filled the little square hole in the bottom level
full of powder, put a damp paper over this, and a little trail of powder
to the edge, and put the other anvil on top; then the bravest boy took
the rod of iron, one end of which had been heated in the charcoal stove,
and while the rest of us put our fingers in our ears and ran away, he
boldly touched off the trail of powder,—and a mighty roar reverberated
down the valley and up the sides of the hills to their very crests.
After saluting the citizens whom we especially wished to favor or annoy,
we went to the public square and fired the anvils until day began to
break, and then we turned home and crawled into our beds to catch a
little sleep before our services should be needed later on.
It was generally eight or nine o’clock before we got our hurried
breakfast and met again at the public square. We visited the shops and
stores, and went up to the little knots of men and women to hear what
they had to say about the cannonading, and intimated very broadly that
we could tell who did it if we only would. Then we lighted our bits of
punk and began the fusillade of fire-crackers that was next in order on
our programme. At this time the cannon fire-cracker, with all its
terrors, had not come; and though here and there some boy had a small
cannon or a pistol, the noise was confined almost entirely to
fire-crackers. Most of us had to be very saving of them; they were
expensive in those days, and our funds were low especially after the
heavy firing in the early hours. We always felt that it was not fair
that we should be obliged to get up before daylight in the morning and
do the shooting, and buy the powder too, and once or twice we carried
around a subscription paper to the business-men to raise funds for the
powder; but this met with poor success. Farmington never was a very
public-spirited place.
There were always plenty of boys who could shoot a fire-cracker and hold
it in their hands until it went off, and now and then one who could hold
it in his teeth with his eyes shut tight. But this last exploit was
considered dangerous, and generally was done only on condition that we
gave a certain number of fire-crackers to the boy who took the risk.
While we were all together, to hear someone else shoot fire-crackers was
a very different thing from shooting them yourself. Although you did
nothing but touch the string to a piece of lighted punk and throw the
fire-cracker in the air, it sounded better when you threw it yourself
than when some other boy threw it in your place.
Often on the Fourth of July we had a picnic in the afternoon, and
sometimes a ball-game too. This, of course, was in case it did not rain;
rain always stopped everything, and it seemed as if it always did rain
on the Fourth. Some people said this was because so much powder was
exploded; but it could not be so, because it generally rained on picnic
days whether it was the Fourth or not. And then on Saturday afternoons,
at the time of our best base-ball matches, it often rained; and this
even after we had gone to the neighboring town, or their boys had come
to visit us. In fact, rain was one of the crosses of our young lives.
There was never any way of knowing whether it would come or not; but
there it was, always hanging above our heads like the famous sword of
Damascus—or some such man—that our teachers told us was suspended by a
hair. Of course, when we complained and were rebellious about the rain
our parents told us that if it did not rain we should have no wheat or
corn, and everything would dry up, and all of us would starve; but these
were only excuses,—for why could it not rain on Sunday, when there was
nothing to do and no one to be harmed? Besides, there were six other
days in the week besides Saturday, and only one holiday in the whole
long summer; and how could there be any use of making it rain on those
days?
Another thing that caused us a good deal of annoyance was that Fourth of
July and Christmas sometimes came on Sunday. Of course, either a
Saturday or a Monday was usually chosen in its place; but this was not
very satisfactory, as some of the people would celebrate on Saturday,
and some on Monday,—and, besides, we could not have a “truly Fourth” on
any day except the Fourth.
When we had a “celebration,” it was generally in the afternoon, and was
held in a grove beside the river below the town. Everyone went to the
celebration, not only in Farmington but in all the country round. On
that day the brass-band came out in its great four-horse wagon, and the
members were dressed in uniform covered with gold braid. Some of them
played on horns almost as long and as big as themselves; and I thought
that if I could only be a member of the band and have one of those big
horns, I should feel very proud and happy. There was always someone
there to sell lemonade, which looked very nice to us boys, although we
hardly ever had a chance to get any after the powder and the
fire-crackers had been bought. There were swings, and things like that;
but they were not much fun, for there were so many boys to use them,
and, besides, the girls had to have the swings most of the time, and all
we could do was to swing them.
Then we had dinner out of a basket. We always thought that this would be
a great deal of fun; but it never was. The main thing that everyone
carried to the dinner was cold chicken, and I hated chicken; and even if
I managed to get something else, it had been smeared and covered over
with chicken gravy, and wasn’t fit to eat,—and then, too, the butter was
melted and ran over everything, and was more like grease than butter.
Besides, there were bugs and flies and mosquitoes getting into
everything, to say nothing of the worms and caterpillars that dropped
down off the trees or crawled up on the tablecloth. I never could see
any fun in a basket picnic, even on the Fourth of July.
After we were through with our dinners, Squire Allen came on the
platform with the speaker of the day. The first thing Squire Allen did
was to put on his gold spectacles; then he took a drink of water from a
pitcher that stood on a stand on the platform; then he came to the front
of the platform and said: “Friends and fellow-citizens: The exercises
will begin by reading the Declaration of Independence.” Then he began to
read, and it seemed as if he never would finish. Of course I knew
nothing about the Declaration of Independence, and neither did the other
boys. We thought it was something Squire Allen wrote, because he always
read it, and we did not think anyone else could read the Declaration of
Independence. We all came up quite close and kept still when he began to
read, but we never stood still until he got through. And we never had
the least idea what it was about. All I remember is the beginning, “When
in the Course of Human Events”; and from what I have learned since I
think this is all that anyone knows about the Declaration of
Independence,—or, for that matter, all that anyone cares.
When Squire Allen finally got through the reading, he introduced the
speaker of the day. This was always some lawyer who came from Warner,
the county-seat, twenty miles away. I had seen the lawyer’s horse and
buggy at the hotel in the morning, and I thought how nice they were, and
how much money a lawyer must make, and what a great man he was, and how
I should like to be a lawyer; and I wondered what one had to study to be
a lawyer, and how long it took, and how much brains, and a lot of things
of this sort. The lawyer never seemed to be a bit afraid to stand up
there on the platform before the audience, and I remember that he wore
nice clothes,—a good deal nicer than those of the farmers and other
people who came to hear him talk,—and his boots looked shiny, as if they
had just been greased. He talked very loud, and seemed to be mad about
something, especially when he spoke of the war and the “Bridish,” and he
waved his hands and arms a great deal, and made quite a fuss about it
all. I know that he said quite a lot about the Declaration of
Independence, and a lot about fighting, and how glorious it was; and
told us all about Europe and Asia and Africa, and how poor and
downtrodden and ignorant all those people were, and how free we were,
all on account of the Declaration of Independence, and the flag, and the
G. A. R., and because our people were such good fighters. He told us
that whatever happened, we must stand by the Declaration of Independence
and the flag, and be ready to fight and to die if we ever had a chance
to fight and die. And the old farmers clapped their hands and nodded
their heads, and said he was a mighty smart man, and a great man, and
thoroughly patriotic, and as long as we had such men the country was
safe; and we boys went away feeling as if we wanted to fight, and
wondering why the people in other countries ever let the rulers run over
them the way they did, and feeling sorry they were so poor and weak and
cowardly, and hoping we could get into a war with the “Bridish” and help
to free her poor ignorant serfs, and wondering if we were old enough to
be taken if we did have a war, and wishing if we did that the lawyer
could be the General, or the President, or anything else, for he
certainly was a great man and could talk louder than anyone we had ever
heard. I usually noticed that the lawyer was running for some office in
the fall, and everyone said that he was just the man that we ought to
have,—he was such a great patriot.
After the speech was over we went home to supper; and after dark, to
the square to see the fireworks. This was a fitting close to a great
day. We always noted every stage of preparation. We knew just how they
put up the platform, and how they fixed the trough for the sky-rockets.
We knew who touched them off, who held the Roman candles, and who
started the pin-wheels, and just what they all cost. We sat in wonder
and delight while the pin-wheels and Roman candles were going through
their performance; but when the sky-rockets were touched off, we watched
them until they exploded in the air, and then raced off in the darkness
to find the sticks.
After the fireworks we slowly went home. Although it had been a long day
since we began shooting the anvils in the gray morning, it was hard to
see the Fourth actually over. Take it all together, we agreed that the
Fourth of July was the best day of all the year.