As a matter of fact, Christmas is a good deal like a Union Depot. The approaches are the most important part of it. By the day before Christmas every one is feeling so good that things begin to happen. People whom you have never suspected of caring for you come up to your office and leave things—cigars, and toys for the children, and Christmas cards. Men with whom you have quarreled during the year shake hands violently all around a circle on the street, and when they come to you they grab yours, too; and you begin to talk elaborately as if nothing had happened—a good deal like two women wading through a formal call; and it makes you feel so good that pretty soon you buy a box of Colorado Durable cigars and you go over to the office of some man for whom you have cherished an undying hatred, because he didn't vote for you for the school board. You peek in his door, and if he isn't there you go in and leave the cigars with your compliments.
There's never been a Christmas at home when I haven't been operated on for a grouch of this sort, and most always it comes the day before. If I had my way there wouldn't be any Christmas—only the day before. On the day before you're so tickled over what the other folks are going to get from you, and so full of pleased anticipation over what you may get from the others, that good humor just bursts out all over you like spring waters from the mountainside.
On Christmas Eve in Homeburg we all go to the Exercises to hear the children perform. They build churches in Homeburg with big doors, so that they can get big Christmas trees in them, and we grown-ups go early in order to hear the kids squeal with wonder when they come in and see those thirty-foot miracles in candles and tinsel, down in front.
Homeburg children are divided into two classes—those who get all of their presents on the church Christmas trees and have to worry through the next day without any additional excitement, and those who have to sit through the Christmas Eve exercises with only a sack of candy to sustain them and who land heavily the next day. The discussion as to which is the better way has raged for a generation, anyway; at least my chum and I discussed it every year when we were boys, he adhering to the Christmas tree plan, and I to the homemade Christmas. And last year, when he came back, we began it all over again, he claiming it was cruel for me to make my children wait until Christmas Day, and I pitying his poor youngsters for getting done with Christmas before it began.
Anyway, Christmas Eve is a grand occasion in the churches, and every year I notice with amazement that some youngster whom I remember as having been formally introduced to society through her birth notice only a few weeks ago, seems to me, has gotten large enough to get up on the platform and speak a piece. They do it at the most unheard-of ages. I believe there are two-year-old orators in the Congregational Sunday school. I get a good deal of suspense out of some of your baseball games here, especially when Chicago plays you, but the most suspense per individual I've ever noticed has been in these Christmas Eve exercises when some youngster just high enough to step over a crack in the floor gets up to recite a piece, and fourteen parents and relatives lean forward and forget to breathe until he has gotten his forty words out, wrong end to, and has been snatched off the stage by his relieved mother.
Competition gets into everything, and it has marred our Christmas exercises a little lately. The Methodists are growing fast and are very ambitious. A few years ago they rented the Opera House, put in two Christmas trees, with a real fireplace between and a Santa Claus who came out of it, and charged ten cents admission. That embittered us Congregationalists. It smacked of commercialism to us, and we would not budge an inch—besides, there wasn't another Opera House to rent. So, nowadays, our spirit of good-fellowship on Christmas Eve is sort of absent-minded and anxious. We are always counting up our attendance and sizing up our tree, and then sliding over to the Opera House and looking over the Methodist layout. Sometimes we beat them, but generally they have a regular mass meeting and make a barrel of money. Last year they turned people away and brought Santa Claus on the stage in a real automobile. We were so jealous that we could hardly cool down in time for Christmas dinner.
As a matter of fact, the only unimportant part of our Christmas season is Christmas Day itself. It is a sort of hiatus in the great doings. When we go home on Christmas Eve, it is with a great peace. We have bought our presents. We have greeted all the returned prodigals. We have made up with a few carefully selected enemies. Our children have spoken their pieces successfully at the Exercises, and have gotten a good start on the job of eating their way through a young mountain range of mixed candies and nuts. All the hustle and worry is over, and we are unanimously happy. The week following Christmas will be one dizzy round of parties and teas for the visitors, and Homeburg will be a delightful place full of the friends of boyhood, with an average of one reunion every fifteen minutes in and out of business hours. But on Christmas Day nothing will happen except the dinner. We'll get our presents in the morning, and then at noon the great crisis will come. We'll either conquer the dinner, or it will conquer us.
You know how it is, Jim, because that's the kind of dinner you had to-day. It was an Athletic Feat—not the ordinary kind of city dinner where you save up carefully during seven courses, and finish strong on the water crackers and cheese, but a real Christmas gorge. Every time I sit down to a Christmas dinner in Homeburg, I feel more strongly than ever that each guest should have his capacity stenciled on him. They are more careful of box cars in this country than they are of humans. You never see a box car that doesn't have "Capacity, 100,000 lbs." stenciled on its sides. And they don't overload that car. There have been times when, if I could have had "Capacity, two turkey thighs, one wish-bone, trimmings, and two pieces of pie" stenciled on me, I would have gotten along better. I think they ought to try to make these Olympic games more useful to our nation by instituting a Christmas dinner marathon. If we have to eat for two hours and a quarter, top speed, once or twice a year, we ought to train up to the task as a nation.
I always feel a little bit nervous about Christmas dinner before it comes, but I never shirk. As a matter of fact, it isn't really dangerous. As far as I know, no one has ever actually exploded in Homeburg on Christmas Day, and we all seem to get away with the job in pretty fair shape. But it spoils the day for anything else. The town is full, in the afternoon, of partially paralyzed men lying around on sofas in a comatose condition, like anacondas sleeping off their bi-monthly lunch. Homeburg is absolutely dead for the rest of the day. If a fire broke out on Christmas afternoon, I don't believe even Chief Dobbs would have the energy to get up and put on his helmet. It's hard on the exiled men who just run down for Christmas Day from the cities. They don't get in on anything but the eating. Sam Frazier struck last year. Said he wasn't going to pay ten dollars fare and incidentals any more, to come down from Chicago on Christmas Day for an all-afternoon view of his brother's feet as said brother lay piled up on the sofa. He was going to come down after this on the Fourth of July.
It doesn't affect the women so badly because they don't eat so much. They haven't time. It takes two women to steer one child safely through a Christmas dinner, anyway, and about three to get the ruins cleared away in time to get up a light lunch in the evening for the reviving hosts. If there is any one time when I would care less to be a woman than at any other time, it is on Christmas afternoon, when her men-folks have gone to sleep and have left her with a few cross children and a carload of Christmas dinner fragments for company.