Christmas in Chicago

by Fanny Butcher

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY FANNY BUTCHER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CHRISTMAS IN CHICAGO

A flare of lights. A giant tree tapering up and up until it seems to melt into the sky, except that the glittering star which crowns it puts to shame the gentle glimmerings in the background of the blue-black heavens. Spangles, like a circus-rider’s dress, flutter in the swish of air, blaze out in the footlight glare of the barrage of lights which are turned on the tree. The family Christmas tree giganticized to a tree for the family of the great city.

And underneath, thousands upon thousands of human beings tramping about in the snow, listening to a band, watching the fluttering bangles of the spectacular tree. A river of motors slowly flowing past the picture–slowly, whether they will or no, for there is no hurrying in the mass that drives down to see the tree.

In the mêlée that worms about beneath the tree there are men and women from the four corners of the earth. There are faces moulded in such fantastically different casts that you cannot but wonder how mankind can be all one mankind. There are voices thick with the gutturals of Middle Europe, soft with the sunshine of the South, and heavy with the interminable consonants of the North.

There is a medley of sound, human voices of all the tones of the earth’s surface doing that peculiarly unmusical feat of all talking at once, and being heightened rather than subdued by the din of the band trying to be heard in a bellowing of that gentle lullaby ‘Heilige Nacht.’ And the overtone is always the honking of impatient motorists or gayly inclined ones who feel that the best way to express approval in modern life is to make as loud and raucous a noise as possible.

And all over the city, in its endless miles of boulevards and parks, little brothers of the great tree are glittering against the sky. And underneath those others, as underneath the great tree itself, mankind swishes and huddles and gazes and talks. Miles and miles apart they are, from the steel mills on the south painting the sky a flame red to the fastnesses of suburban sobriety and sedateness on the north, from the vast new bungalow-studded southwest to the factory-dotted northwest merging into two-flat buildings and inter-urbaned real estate plots.

The municipal tree of Chicago–whether it be the great tree on the lake front or the offspring which each local community rears as a pledge of its own Christmas joys–is a triumph of civic ideals. It is a symbol to the thousands, who are strangers–if not in fact, at least in that pitifully intense way in which mankind can be alone in the millions that make a great city–that the city is human. And it has been such a short time that the city has been human–that it has had time to be anything but a growing, hungry, physically developing giant of a child. Out of its rompers, Chicago is now, and present at the great moment of decorating the Christmas tree of the ‘children.’

There is something adolescent and very charming and very naïve about this Christmasy Chicago. It has just reached the time when it feels that the world is taking some notice of it, when it feels its first thrills of conquest, when it cleans out its pockets, throws away the broken knife blades and the slightly worn wads of gum and the marbles and substitutes the picture of the chorus girl and the pocket comb. It is washing behind its ears. And it can blush with gorgeous naïveté at the thought of making a social faux-pas. It is terribly self-conscious, and like all growing youth it still has its cosmic dreams.