"What do you do for Christmas?" asked Robbie a day or two later. "It's only a week tomorrow."
"What do you mean—do for Christmas?"
"Why, people coming to stay, and a party perhaps. You know."
"What do you mean? The only party we ever had was on Aunt Jael's seventieth birthday and that's in August."
"It must be different at your house from anywhere else. People have a jolly sort of time, a lot of people in the house and that kind of thing."
"There was something about it in Westward Ho! the book he stole from me and burned just before you came. It said something about 'happy sports and mummers' plays,' and cakes and ale and some word like flapdragons. It's what worldly people do, I suppose, and sinners, but not us; I've never heard of it with the Saints."
Robbie was too wise to attack priggery-piety in the open. "I don't know about all that. You do talk funnily; your Grandmother seems to be different from other people. You must know all the special things you do at Christmas, all the special things you eat—"
"I don't. What are they?"
"Oh, roast goose and turkey and plum-pudding and mince pies. Then for tea the big Christmas cake, crammed with raisins and covered with almond paste and icing sugar with crystallized fruit on top and those little green bits like candied peel—not really candied peel, it's some name I forget, anyway it's nice. If you're a little boy you're allowed to stay in the dining-room all the same and eat all the walnuts and dates you want and drink a little port or madeira! What do you have for Christmas dinner?"
"Hash," I replied enviously, "and a roly-poly pudding with no jam, or hardly any, for afterwards."