Or it ought to. But when a Christian finds himself, on that most sacred of all the Christian holidays, in a Moslem country, say in Egypt, the procuring of the wherewithal to make the prescribed good cheer becomes a matter of no small difficulty.
If the Christian be an English one, the difficulties are apt to be increased by the fact that an Englishman is nothing if not conservative.
To the average Englishman the correct celebration of Christmas means attendance at divine service, perhaps!—the regulation Christmas dinner, certainly.
Christmas means a crisp, cold day, the home bright with glowing fires—a yule-log, maybe—and flashing with the brilliant green of ivy and the crimson of holly-berries; a dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding; and, to wind up with, a bowl of steaming wassail and a kiss under the mistletoe.
When an Englishman finds himself in a country where he can sit in the open air, under a blazing sun, on Christmas Day, and where neither roast-beef nor plum-pudding has any place in the domestic economy, and where the "wassail" is always drunk iced, and called by another name, and where mistletoe does not grow, the possibility presents itself that he would be obliged to accommodate himself to the situation and do without these particular features.
Not at all!
He immediately sets to work to obtain them, crying aloud, meantime, against the barbarity of a land that does not offer, at this particular season, the things that are peculiar to his own tight little island.
To the casual observer this may seem a light task that he has set himself. But it is by no means so. On every hand he is met by an almost impenetrable wall of difficulties.
The fire he cannot have, for the very simple reason that there is no chimney in the house.
The beef he can get by sending for it to England, where it has been purchased from either Northern Europe or America. But where is the great fire before which it ought to be roasted, by the aid of a "jack," and with frequent bastings at the hands of a comfortable, rosy-cheeked, red-armed woman cook, in "Merry England"?