XXII.
NEW YEAR'S DAY.
DEAR SISTERS:—After all, this city of New York is a wonderful institution. Vermont has its specialties, such as maple-sugar, pine shingles, and education; but in such things as style, fashion, and general gentilities, I must say this great Empire City isn't to be sneezed at, even by a Green Mountainer. Of course we are ahead in religion, morality, decorum, and a kind of politics that consolidates all these things into great moral ideas—as rusticoats, greenings and Spitzenbergen apples are ground down into one barrel of such sweet cider as we used to steal through the bunghole with a straw. You will recollect the straws—a Down-east invention, which these degenerated Yorkers have stolen, and are now using unblushingly for mint-juleps, sherry-cobblers, and such awful drinks as New England has put her foot down against with a stamp that makes inebriating individuals shake in their boots. But New York won't put her foot down, and the encroachment upon our patent-right for straws is just winked at.
Dear me, how one thing does lead a person's mind into another! I took up my pen to write about New Year's Day in New York, and here I am, back in that old cider-mill behind our orchard, with heaps of red and yellow apples piled up in the grass, and the old blind horse moving round and round in the mill-ring, dragging along that great wooden wheel, under which we could hear the soft-gushing squelch of the apples, while all the air smelt rich and fruity with them.
Do you remember the luscious juice dropping from the press, and the full barrels lying about, with the sweetness beginning to yeast through the bungholes? Then it was we pounced down upon them with our straws, and it was these straws that brought New Year's Day in New York and the old cider-mill at home into my mind at once. Thus it is, my sisters, with us children of genius; thought is born of thought, feeling springs out of feeling, till creation and re-creation become spontaneosities.
Some people have said of Phœmie Frost that she lacks philosophy and that transcendental essence which becomes the highest female type in New England. If any such caviler should reach our Society, have the moral courage to point out that last paragraph, and see if the wretches have forgotten to blush for themselves.
Christmas Day isn't anything very particular outside of the Episcopal Church, in our parts. Somehow the Pilgrim Fathers took a notion against it when they cut away from the old country, and built square meeting-houses all over New England. But they set up the same thing under a new-fangled name. Thanksgiving was just the same to them, and showed their independence; so they roasted and baked and stewed, and made pumpkin-pies a specialty—because the cavaliers in England couldn't get pumkins to compete with them—and went into their meeting-houses to thank God that they had good crops, instead of going down on their knees—which they didn't, because of standing up to pray—in solemn gratitude that the blessed Lord was born upon earth.
Sisters, as a New England female, it would be against nature to say that the Pilgrim Fathers wasn't right in sinking Christmas in Thanksgiving, and thanking God for full crops, because the corn and potatoes were things they all could understand and accept with universal thankfulness; but about the birth of Christ, and its merciful object, no two sects that I ever heard of could agree, much less the Old Church and the New Covenanters.
There it is again; my pen is getting demoralized. Christmas has come and gone. What more have I got to say about it? Why, just nothing. Wise people accept the past and look forward.
Cousin Dempster insisted upon it, that I should come up and spend New Year's Day with them. Cousin E. E. was going to receive calls, and wanted some distinguished friend to help her entertain.