Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 730 / December 22, 1877

'So many men so many minds' has been a proverb long before our days, and will be to the end of time and human history; and uniformity of sentiment is the one thing which men need never hope to attain.
Christmas-time is one of these battle-fields of feeling. To some it is just the consecration of so many circumstances of torture; to others the meeting-point of so many facts of pleasure. From the conventional greeting to the orthodox dinner—from the 'seasonable gifts' that are more obligatory than voluntary, to the toast that heralds the punch, and the dreams that follow on that last glass—all is so much pain to the flesh and weariness to the spirit; and they wonder how any one can find it otherwise. What is there in Christmas-time to make it pleasurable? they say. The gathering together of the family? A lot of rough boys home from school, who spoil the furniture and tease the dogs, lame the horses and ravage the garden, make the servants cross, the girls rude, and the younger children insubordinate; who upset all the order of the house, destroy its comfort like its quiet, and to whose safe return to discipline and your own restoration to tranquillity you look forward with impatient longing from the first hour of their arrival to the last of their stay? Or the advent of your married daughter with her two spoilt babies, who cry if they are looked at and want everything that they see, and that very objectionable young man her husband, with his ultra opinions and passion for argument, whom she would marry in spite of all that you could say, but to whom you can scarcely force yourself to be decently civil, not to speak of cordial, and whose presence is a perpetual blister while it lasts? Is this the family gathering about which you are expected to gush?—this with the addition of your son's fine-lady wife who snubs his mother and sisters with as little breeding as reserve, finds nothing at your table that she can eat, lives with her smelling-bottle to her nose and propped up with cushions on the sofa, and gives you to understand that she considers herself humiliated by her association with your family, and your son as much exalted as she is degraded? This is the domestic aspect of Christmas-time which is to make you forget all the ordinary troubles of life, creating in their stead a Utopia where ill-feeling is as little known as ennui , and family jars are as impossible as personal discomfort and dissent. Holding this picture in your hand, you decline to subscribe your name to the Io pæan universally chanted in praise of Christmas, and wrap yourself up in sullen silence when your neighbour congratulates you on having all your family about you, and wishes you a merry Christmas as if he meant it.