“Where did you get that word?”
“Made it up. It’s a good word and it’s mine and I like it. And don’t interrupt. As I was saying, we all deplore the mercenaryism and the materialism and the senseless display that’s crept into Christmas, and a lot of people spout about it just as you’re doing, but nobody does anything to try to reform it. At least nobody has since they started the custom of sending Christmas cards instead of gifts. But that was a mistake; it’s been overdone into an evil. There’s a passion to see who can buy the most expensive cards; and you spend weeks beforehand making up the lists and addressing the envelops, and the cards cost as much as the presents used to cost and make ever so much more bother getting them out. Look at what happened to us last Christmas! Look at what’s sure to happen this Christmas! And all you do is stand there—sit there, I mean—and spout at me as though I were to blame. Suggest a way out, why don’t you? I’d be only too delighted if you would.”
“I will,” proclaimed the challenged party. He thought hard. “We’ll run away from it—that’s what we’ll do.”
“Where do we run?”
“That’s a mere detail. I’m working out the main project. In advance we’ll circulate the word that we’re escaping from the civilized brand of Christmas; that on December twenty-fifth we’re going to be far, far beyond the reach of long-distance telephones, telegraph lines, wireless, radio, mental telepathy, rural free delivery routes, janitors with their paws out for ten-dollar bills and other well-wishers; that we’re not going to send any presents to our well-to-do friends and are not expecting any from them; that we’re not even figuring on mailing out a single, solitary, dad-busted greetings card. There’s plenty of time ahead of us for putting the campaign through. We’ll remember our immediate relatives and your pet charities and any worth-while dependents we can think of. And then we’ll just dust out and forget to leave any forwarding address.”
“We could try Florida again,” suggested Mrs. Bugbee.
“The land of the sap and the sapodilla—we will not! What’s Florida now except New York with a pair of white duck pants on?”
“Well, the climate there is—”
“It is not! It’s all cluttered up with real-estate agents, the climate is. Besides I never could see the advantages of traveling eighteen hundred miles in mid-winter to get into the same kind of weather that you travel eighteen hundred miles in midsummer to get out of.”
“Well, then, we might run up to Lake Placid or the Berkshires. Of course it’ll be too early at either place for the regular season, but I suppose there’ll be a few people we know—”