[5] Reprinted from “Harper’s Magazine” by special permission of Edith Barnard Delano. All rights reserved by the author.
GOD REST YOU, MERRY CHRISTIANS[6]
George Madden Martin
It was the night before Christmas. Any Christian must have known it, apart from the calendar, by reason of a driving, haunting sense of things yet undone, and a goaded gathering together of exhausted faculties for a final sprint towards the accomplishing of all before the dawning of The Day.
Because we long have associated certain things with Christmas we have come to believe them integrant. The blended odor of orange peel, lighted tapers, and evergreens rushing upon us as the Church door opens means Christmas, even as much as the murmuring voices of the children within, each pew a variegated flower-bed of faces up-lifted to the light and tinsel of a giant tree.
Aromatic odors, other than frankincense and myrrh, mean Christmas, cedar, spices; and certain flavors, an almond kernel laid against a raisin and crushed between molars to the enravishment of the palate, seem to belong to Christmas; the translucent olive of preserved citron, exuding sugared richness, suggests Christmas, together with the crinkled layers of the myriad-seeded, luscious-hearted fig; blazing brandy means Christmas, and the velvet smoothness of egg, cream and Old Bourbon blended, seems part of Christmas too.
But because the average Christian is an unreasoning creature, and, like the ox, bending his neck to the yoke because the yoke offers, plods the way along unquestioning beneath it, the preceding mad rush means Christmas too, and the feverish dream wherein, for instance, the long strand of embroidery silk forever pulls through, unknotted. And it is expected that the bones should ache at Christmas, and the flesh cry out for weariness, and the brain be fagged to the excluding of more than a blurred impression of The Day when it is come.
In the Rumsey household the celebration of the festival began on Christmas Eve with a family gathering of children and grandchildren. There is a certain wild, last hour, preceding the moment of gracious and joyous bestowal, made up of frenzied haste and exhaustion. It was that hour now.
“Anne Rumsey calls it the tears and tissue-paper stage,” was told as evidence of Anne’s singular attitude towards the ways of the Christian world about her.
“And I am sure I don’t know what I’ve done to have any one as queer as Anne for my child,” Mrs. Rumsey, handsome, imposing, on her knees by the bed tying parcels, was saying to her married daughter, Florrie, come home with her babies for Christmas. “There’s no one prides themselves more on the conventional than I do, and I am sure you never did an unconventional thing in your life. But I suppose every family has to have its black sheep, not”—hastily at Florrie’s horrified disclaimer—“not that I mean that, of course—Florrie, how you take one up!—nor ugly duckling exactly, either, for Anne is the handsomest of you all—what did I tie in this package, do you know? I’m sure I don’t—but that a child of mine should thus deliberately each year stand apart, outside the Christmas spirit, while others—it almost looks as if I had not brought my children up with a proper regard for sacred things.”