“Chuck,” I said, “I have a dollar in my pocket that isn’t busy, and I want you to take me to some one who needs it more than you or me.”
So off we trudged, Chuck and I, and the boy between. A few blocks farther down we turned toward the river. It was familiar ground to Chuck and me—but the boy’s eyes were opened to a new world. He saw the misery of the slums. He passed a boy of his own age, barefooted—in December—staggering under a load of scrap-wood that would have troubled a man to bear. He saw a little girl, half clad, shivering behind an ash-can, trying to hide herself from her drunken father, who leered at the waif from a hallway across the street. Pushing on into the very heart of that pitiable section, through poverty, want and wretchedness, the boy went with us through a miserable tenement, wherein the spectre of Starvation stalked through the sordid halls and snarled at my dollar bill.
On the car, homeward bound, the boy tugged at my elbow.
“Father,” he said, “besides what’s in the closet, they’s a lot of other things I don’t play with any more.”
Ever since then we have had an annual house-cleaning about a week before Christmas, and the Salvation Army wagon carries away a goodly load. Indeed, the event has come to be regarded as quite a festal occasion.
As the years go on and the boy begins to leave playland behind, I would not hurry him into the realism of the grown-up’s Yuletide. Let the charm of mystery, of certainty, of anticipation, linger as long as it will.
Perhaps last year you thought it was a bit incongruous when you found yourself slipping a safety razor into a gaily-hued sock, size ten, dangling in the chimney-corner. And perhaps you have decided that he is too big for that sort of thing now, and that you will let it go by default this Christmas. Maybe you are about to tell him so.
My friend, defer it.
Stick right on in the old way as long as you can get the boy to stick with you; for, once you have severed the ties of the Christmas of his childhood, you will have cut the tinsel thread that links your son to the only fairyland he will ever know.