by A. A. Milne
* * *
I hate travelling on Boxing Day, but one must occasionally do things that one dislikes.
Christmas Carol
Sara Teasdale
Christmas Carol
The kings they came from out the south,
All dressed in ermine fine;
They bore Him gold and chrysoprase,
And gifts of precious wine.
* * *
The shepherds came from out the north,
Their coats were brown and old;
They brought Him little new-born lambs
They had not any gold.
* * *
The wise men came from out the east,
And they were wrapped in white;
The star that led them all the way
Did glorify the night.
* * *
The angels came from heaven high,
And they were clad with wings;
And lo, they brought a joyful song
The host of heaven sings.
* * *
The kings they knocked upon the door,
The wise men entered in,
The shepherds followed after them
To hear the song begin.
* * *
The angels sang through all the night
Until the rising sun,
But little Jesus fell asleep
Before the song was done.
A Christmas Letter
Stephen Leacock
A Christmas Letter
(In answer to a young lady who has sent an invitation to be present at a children's party)
* * *
Madamoiselle,
* * *
Allow me very gratefully but firmly to refuse your kind invitation. You doubtless mean well; but your ideas are unhappily mistaken.
* * *
Let us understand one another once and for all. I cannot at my mature age participate in the sports of children with such abandon as I could wish. I entertain, and have always entertained, the sincerest regard for such games as Hunt-the-Slipper and Blind-Man's Buff. But I have now reached a time of life, when, to have my eyes blindfolded and to have a powerful boy of ten hit me in the back with a hobby-horse and ask me to guess who hit me, provokes me to a fit of retaliation which could only culminate in reckless criminality. Nor can I cover my shoulders with a drawing-room rug and crawl round on my hands and knees under the pretence that I am a bear without a sense of personal insufficiency, which is painful to me.
* * *
Neither can I look on with a complacent eye at the sad spectacle of your young clerical friend, the Reverend Mr. Uttermost Farthing, abandoning himself to such gambols and appearing in the role of life and soul of the evening. Such a degradation of his holy calling grieves me, and I cannot but suspect him of ulterior motives.
* * *
You inform me that your maiden aunt intends to help you to entertain the party. I have not, as you know, the honour of your aunt's acquaintance, yet I think I may with reason surmise that she will organize games--guessing games--in which she will ask me to name a river in Asia beginning with a Z; on my failure to do so she will put a hot plate down my neck as a forfeit, and the children will clap their hands. These games, my dear young friend, involve the use of a more adaptable intellect than mine, and I cannot consent to be a party to them.
* * *
May I say in conclusion that I do not consider a five-cent pen-wiper from the top branch of a Xmas tree any adequate compensation for the kind of evening you propose.
* * *
I have the honour
To subscribe myself,
Your obedient servant.
Merry Christmas
Stephen Leacock
Merry Christmas
"MY DEAR Young Friend," said Father Time, as he laid his hand gently upon my shoulder, "you are entirely wrong."
* * *
Then I looked up over my shoulder from the table at which I was sitting and I saw him.
* * *
But I had known, or felt, for at least the last half-hour that he as standing somewhere near me.
* * *
You have had, I do not doubt, good reader, more than once that strange uncanny feeling that there is some one unseen standing beside you, in a darkened room, let us say, with a dying fire, when the night has grown late, and the October wind sounds low outside, and when, through the thin curtain that we call Reality, the Unseen World starts for a moment clear upon our dreaming sense.
* * *
You have had it? Yes, I know you have. Never mind telling me about it. Stop. I don't want to hear about that strange presentiment you had the night your Aunt Eliza broke her leg. Don't let's bother with your experience. I want to tell mine.
* * *
"You are quite mistaken, my dear young friend," repeated Father Time, "quite wrong."
* * *
"Young friend?" I said, my mind, as one's mind is apt to in such a case, running to an unimportant detail. "Why do you call me young?"
* * *
"Your pardon," he answered gently — he had a gentle way with him, had Father Time. "The fault is in my failing eyes. I took you at first sight for something under a hundred."
* * *
"Under a hundred?" I expostulated. "Well, I should think so!"
* * *
"Your pardon again," said Time, "the fault is in my failing memory. I forgot. You seldom pass that nowadays, do you? Your life is very short of late."
* * *
I heard him breathe a wistful hollow sigh. Very ancient and dim he seemed as he stood beside me. But I did not turn to look upon him. I had no need to. I knew his form, in the inner and clearer sight of things, as well as every human being knows by innate instinct, the Unseen face and form of Father Time.
* * *
I could hear him murmuring beside me, "Short — short, your life is short"; till the sound of it seemed to mingle with the measured ticking of a clock somewhere in the silent house.
* * *
Then I remembered what he had said.
* * *
"How do you know that I am wrong?" I asked. "And how can you tell what I was thinking?"
* * *
"You, said it out loud," answered Father Time. "But it wouldn't have mattered, anyway. You said that Christmas was all played out and done with."
* * *
"Yes," I admitted, "that's what I said."
* * *
"And what makes you think that?" he questioned, stooping, so it seemed to me, still further over my shoulder.
* * *
"Why," I answered, "the trouble is this. I've been sitting here for hours, sitting till goodness only knows how far into the night, trying to think out something to write for a Christmas story. And it won't go. It can't be done — not in these awful days."
* * *
"A Christmas Story?"
* * *
"Yes. You see, Father Time," I explained, glad with a foolish little vanity of my trade to be able to tell him something that I thought enlightening, "all the Christmas stuff — stories and jokes and pictures — is all done, you know, in October."
* * *
I thought it would have surprised him, but I was mistaken.
* * *
"Dear me," he said, "not till October! What a rush! How well I remember in Ancient Egypt — as I think you call it — seeing them getting out their Christmas things, all cut in hieroglyphics, always two or three years ahead."
* * *
"Two or three years!" I exclaimed.
* * *
"Pooh," said Time, "that was nothing. Why in Babylon they used to get their Christmas jokes ready — all baked in clay — a whole Solar eclipse ahead of Christmas. They said, I think, that the public preferred them so."
* * *
"Egypt?" I said. "Babylon? But surely, Father Time, there was no Christmas in those days. I thought ——"
* * *
"My dear boy," he interrupted grav
ely, "don't you know that there has always been Christmas?"
* * *
I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and stood beside the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece. The little wreaths of smoke from the fading fire seemed to mingle with his shadowy outline.
* * *
"Well," he said presently, "what is it that is wrong with Christmas?"
* * *
"Why," I answered, "all the romance, the joy, the beauty of it has gone, crushed and killed by the greed of commerce and the horrors of war. I am not, as you thought I was, a hundred years old, but I can conjure up, as anybody can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a hundred years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses, standing deep among the evergreens, with the light twinkling from the windows on the snow; the warmth and comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth; the merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little children with their eyes dancing in the Christmas fire- light, waiting for Father Christmas in his fine mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it," I added, "as if it were yesterday."
* * *
"It was but yesterday," said Father Time, and his voice seemed to soften with the memory of bygone years. "I remember it well."
* * *
"Ah," I continued, "that was Christmas indeed. Give me back such days as those, with the old good cheer, the old stage coaches and the gabled inns and the warm red wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and I'll believe again in Christmas, yes, in Father Christmas himself."
* * *
"Believe in him?" said Time quietly. "You may well do that. He happens to be standing outside in the street at this moment."
* * *
"Outside?" I exclaimed. "Why don't he come in?"
* * *
"He's afraid to," said Father Time. "He's frightened and he daren't come in unless you ask him. May I call him in?"
* * *
I signified assent, and Father Time went to the window for a moment and beckoned into the darkened street. Then I heard footsteps, clumsy and hesitant they seemed, upon the stairs. And in a moment a figure stood framed in the doorway — the figure of Father Christmas. He stood shuffling his feet, a timid, apologetic look upon his face.
* * *
How changed he was!
* * *
I had known in my mind's eye, from childhood up, the face and form of Father Christmas as well as that of Old Time himself. Everybody knows, or once knew him — a jolly little rounded man, with a great muffler wound about him, a packet of toys upon his back and with such merry, twinkling eyes and rosy cheeks as are only given by the touch of the driving snow and the rude fun of the North Wind. Why, there was once a time, not yet so long ago, when the very sound of his sleigh-bells sent the blood running warm to the heart.
* * *
But now how changed.
* * *
All draggled with the mud and rain he stood, as if no house had sheltered him these three years past. His old red Jersey was tattered in a dozen places, his muffler frayed and ravelled.
* * *
The bundle of toys that he dragged with him in a net seemed wet and worn till the cardboard boxes gaped asunder. There were boxes among them, I vow, that he must have been carrying these three past years.
* * *
But most of all I noted the change that had come over the face of Father Christmas. The old brave look of cheery confidence was gone. The smile that had beamed responsive to the laughing eyes of countless children around unnumbered Christmas- trees was there no more. And in the place of it there showed a look of timid apology, of apprehensiveness, as of one who has asked in vain the warmth and shelter of a human home — such a look as the harsh cruelty of this world has stamped upon the faces of its outcasts.
* * *
So stood Father Christmas shuffling upon the threshold, fumbling his poor tattered hat in his hand.
* * *
"Shall I come in?" he said, his eyes appealingly on Father Time.
* * *
"Come," said Time. He turned to speak to me, "Your room is dark. Turn up the lights. He's used to light, bright light and plenty of it. The dark has frightened him these three years past."
* * *
I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all the more cruelly the tattered figure before us.
* * *
Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor. Then he paused, as if in sudden fear.
* * *
"Is this floor mined?" he said.
* * *
"No, no," said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a murmured whisper, "He's afraid. He was blown up in a mine in No Man's Land between the trenches at Christmas-time in 1914. It broke his nerve."
* * *
"May I put my toys on that machine gun?" asked Father Christmas timidly. "It will help to keep them dry."
* * *
"It is not a machine gun," said Time gently. "See, it is only a pile of books upon the sofa." And to me he whispered, "They turned a machine gun on him in the streets of Warsaw. He thinks he sees them everywhere since then."
* * *
"It's all right, Father Christmas," I said, speaking as cheerily as I could, while I rose and stirred the fire into a blaze.
* * *
"There are no machine guns here and there are no mines. This is but the house of a poor writer."
* * *
"Ah," said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat still further and attempting something of a humble bow, "a writer? Are you Hans Andersen, perhaps?"
* * *
"Not quite," I answered.
* * *
"But a great writer, I do not doubt," said the old man, with a humble courtesy that he had learned, it well may be, centuries ago in the yule-tide season of his northern home. "The world owes much to its great books. I carry some of the greatest with me always. I have them here ——"
* * *