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.
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