Christmas in this town is only a feat. It's a race against time in two heats. If you win the first one, you get your shopping done on the day before. If you win the second, you get through Christmas Day, before your patience and good spirits give out. Of course, New Yorkers, like yourselves, who indulge in families and other old customs, have a mighty good time out of it. Christmas with a family is great anywhere on earth. But that isn't New York's fault. If you didn't have a family, you would be dining out or going to some matinée or sitting around watching the clock. That's where it is your solemn duty to envy Homeburg if you never have done it before. And that's why I would be homesick to-day if you had fed me four dinners, Mrs. Jim, and had been a whole covey, or bevy, or flock, or constellation of angels—whichever is correct.
I don't mean to say that we get any more at Christmas than you do. We enjoy and endure our presents, same as any one else. And we have just as hard a time buying them. There aren't enough people in Homeburg to make a Christmas jam, but we have our own line of troubles. The question in Homeburg is not how to keep from spending so much money but how to spend what we have. The storekeepers don't pamper us. In fact they are severe with us. If we don't buy what they offer the first year, they store it up, and we have to take it the next Christmas. When the Homeburg storekeepers have had a bad season, it's up to us to go back the next year and face the same old line of junk, knowing it will be there until we give in and buy it. There are two Christmas gift edition copies of Trilby still on sale in Homeburg, and Sam Green the druggist has had a ten-dollar manicure set on sale for ten years now. He won't get another, either. Says he was stung on the first one, and he's going to get his money back before he goes in any deeper. It goes down about fifty cents a year in price, and last year Jim Reebe almost bought it at four dollars and seventy-five cents for Selma Snood. We have hopes of him this year—unless he and Selma quarrel or get married, either of which will be fatal.
No, we have our troubles, same as you do, and Homeburg is full, on the day before Christmas, of worried fathers who duck into the stores about seven p.m. and try to buy enough stuff to eat up a ten dollar bill before the doors close. But that's a minor detail. What makes me love our Christmas is its communism. Christmas isn't a family rite in Homeburg. It's a town festival, a cross between Home-coming Week and a general amnesty celebration.
In Homeburg you come home to the whole town.
People come home for Christmas all over the world, but in Homeburg you don't merely come home to your family, you come home to the whole town. A week before the twenty-fifth the clans begin to gather. Usually the college folks come first. Sometimes we have as many as a dozen, and the whole town is on edge to see them. It's next to a circus parade in interest because you never can tell what new sort of clothes the boys are going to spring on us. In the grand old days when DeLancey Payley and Sam Singer used to blow in for Christmas, they walked up from the depot between double lines of admirers, and their clothes never failed to strike us with awe. I remember the year when Sam came home with one of those overcoats with a sort of hood effect in the back. I never saw one before or since. He was also wearing a felt hat as flat as a soup plate that year and a two-quart pipe fitted carefully into his face, and when old Bill Dorgan, the drayman, saw him, he threw up both hands and cried, "My gosh, it ain't possible!"
Then the children begin coming back. There is a great difference between Homeburg and New York regarding children. In New York a child is personal property. But in Homeburg a child belongs to the whole town. A birth notice is a real news item in Homeburg. I suppose every baby is personally inspected by at least two hundred citizens. We criticize their care and feeding, suggest spanking when they are a little older, quiver unanimously with horror when they begin to "flip" freight trains, or get scarlet fever, and watch them grow up as eagerly as you New Yorkers watched the Woolworth Building. When they are graduated from high school we are all there with bouquets and presents, and we have an equity in the whole brood. Molly Strawn, the washerwoman's daughter, got more flowers than any one last year. And when they leave town to get a job, if they are boys, or when some rude outsider breaks in with a marriage license and despoils us of them, if they are girls, we all feel the loss.
That's why Christmas means so much more to us. At Christmas time the town children come home. Will Askinson comes home from Chicago. He's doing very well up there, and it takes him two hours to get the length of Main Street on the first day after he arrives. Every one has to hear about it. Sadie Gastit comes home from Des Moines with a baby; regular custom of hers. Sometimes she makes the same baby do for two years, but usually it's a new one. I remember Sadie when she was only knee high to a grasshopper, and her mother spanked her for climbing the Republican flagpole during the McKinley campaign. The Flint children come down from Chicago to visit their aunt. There were only a boy and girl when they left fifteen years ago. Now there are eleven, counting wife, husband, and acquisitions. Last year Ad Bridge brought a new wife home from Denver to show us. Year before last Miss Annie Simms, who has been teaching in Minneapolis, brought down a young man to show to her family. She was going to be exclusive about it, but did it work? Not much. She had to show him all around. We just happened over there in droves. Everybody loves Annie and we were afraid for a little while that she was going to be an old maid. The young man will bring her down this year I suppose. They were married last June.
All the Homeburg children and grandchildren arrive in the last two days before Christmas. They go home to their folks to deposit their baggage, and then they all come down-town to the post-office, to get the mail ostensibly but in reality to shake hands all around. The day before Christmas is one long reception on Main Street. The old town fairly hums.