“But you can’t go changing things like this,” she told me. “What’ll become of Christmas?”
“Christmas,” I says, “don’t need you or me, Mis’ Sykes, to be its guardians. All Christmas needs is for us to get out of its way, and leave it express what it means.”
“But the home Christmas,” she says, ’most like a wail. “Would you do away with that?”
Then I sort of turned on her. I couldn’t help it.
“Whose home?” I says stern. “If it’s your home you mean, or any of the thousands of others like it where Christmas is kept, then you know, and they all know, that nothing on earth can take away the Christmas feeling and the Christmas joy as long as you want it to be there. But if it’s the homes you mean—and there’s thousands of ’em—where no Christmas ever comes, you surely ain’t arguing to keep them the way they’ve been kept?”
But she continued to shake her head.
“You can do as you like, of course,” she said, “and so can everybody else. It’s their privilege. But as for me, I shall trim my little tree here by our own fireside. And here we shall celebrate Christmas—Jeddie and Nora and father and me.”
“Why can’t you do both?” I says. “I wouldn’t have you give up your fireside end of things for anything on earth. But why can’t you do both?”
Mis’ Sykes didn’t rightly seem to know—at least she didn’t say. But she give me to understand that her mind run right along in the self-same groove it had had made for it, cozy.