CHRISTMAS-TIME
'So many men so many minds' has been a proverb long before our days, and will be to the end of time and human history; and uniformity of sentiment is the one thing which men need never hope to attain.
Christmas-time is one of these battle-fields of feeling. To some it is just the consecration of so many circumstances of torture; to others the meeting-point of so many facts of pleasure. From the conventional greeting to the orthodox dinner – from the 'seasonable gifts' that are more obligatory than voluntary, to the toast that heralds the punch, and the dreams that follow on that last glass – all is so much pain to the flesh and weariness to the spirit; and they wonder how any one can find it otherwise. What is there in Christmas-time to make it pleasurable? they say. The gathering together of the family? A lot of rough boys home from school, who spoil the furniture and tease the dogs, lame the horses and ravage the garden, make the servants cross, the girls rude, and the younger children insubordinate; who upset all the order of the house, destroy its comfort like its quiet, and to whose safe return to discipline and your own restoration to tranquillity you look forward with impatient longing from the first hour of their arrival to the last of their stay? Or the advent of your married daughter with her two spoilt babies, who cry if they are looked at and want everything that they see, and that very objectionable young man her husband, with his ultra opinions and passion for argument, whom she would marry in spite of all that you could say, but to whom you can scarcely force yourself to be decently civil, not to speak of cordial, and whose presence is a perpetual blister while it lasts? Is this the family gathering about which you are expected to gush? – this with the addition of your son's fine-lady wife who snubs his mother and sisters with as little breeding as reserve, finds nothing at your table that she can eat, lives with her smelling-bottle to her nose and propped up with cushions on the sofa, and gives you to understand that she considers herself humiliated by her association with your family, and your son as much exalted as she is degraded? This is the domestic aspect of Christmas-time which is to make you forget all the ordinary troubles of life, creating in their stead a Utopia where ill-feeling is as little known as ennui, and family jars are as impossible as personal discomfort and dissent. Holding this picture in your hand, you decline to subscribe your name to the Io pæan universally chanted in praise of Christmas, and wrap yourself up in sullen silence when your neighbour congratulates you on having all your family about you, and wishes you a merry Christmas as if he meant it.
If the domestic aspect is disagreeable, what is the social? – A round of dinners of which the menu is precisely the same from Alpha to Omega: – turbot and thick lobster-sauce; roast-beef and boiled turkey; indigestible plum-pudding and murderous mince-pies; with sour oranges and sweet sherry to keep the balance even, and by the creation of two acids perhaps neutralise each other and the third. This is the food set before unoffending citizens under the name and style of Christmas dinners for the month or six weeks during which the idiotic custom of Christmas dinners at all is supposed to last. You are expected to live in this monotony of dyspepsia and antipathetic diet till you loathe the very sight of the familiar food, and long for a change with a vehemence which makes you ashamed of yourself, and more than half afraid that you are developing into a gourmand of the worst kind.
As if your nights were not sufficiently broken by the horrible compounds which trouble your digestion and disturb your brain, torturers known as the 'waits' prowl through the streets from midnight to dawn, causing you agonies beyond those which even the hurdy-gurdy men inflict. You are just falling to sleep – painfully courted and hardly won – when a hideous discord worse than the wailings of cats startles you into a nervous wakefulness which banishes all hope for that night. What can you do? They are too far off for that jug of water to take effect, and you must not fire; anathemas do not hurt them, and if said aloud only waken up your wife and make her cry if she does not preach. You have nothing for it then but to lie still and groan inwardly, devoting to the infernal gods all the idiotic circumstances by which your life is rendered wretched, and your health, already frail, set still further wrong. In the morning, when wearied and nervously feverish from want of sleep, you go into the garden for a little quiet and delectation, you find your greenhouses stripped of the flowers which you had been lovingly watching for weeks, and your evergreens as ridiculously cropped as a shaved poodle. This is the day for the decoration of the church, and you, having made an expensive hobby of your garden, have to contribute what has cost months and good money to rear, for the childish satisfaction of John and Joan, lasting just two hours and five minutes. Not only have you lost your flowers and your evergreens – that splendid holly, which yesterday glowed like a flame, today nothing but a bundle of chopped ends! – but you know that your favourite daughter is flirting with the curate, and that a great deal is going on under cover of wreaths and crosses, laurustinus and chrysanthemum, of which you strongly disapprove yet cannot check. It is Christmas-time; decorating the church has become in these later days a kind of religious duty; and as a conscript father of your village, you must not forbid your daughter this pious pleasure any more than you can refuse your costly contribution in kind.
Turn to the financial side of the time; and what have you? – bills coming in that you neither expected nor knew of, and every one looking for a Christmas-box, and insolent or irritated if they do not get it. The servants obsequious to the worth of half a sovereign – tradesmen and their lads punctual in anticipation of half-crowns – postmen levying blackmail, and watermen and dustmen demanding as their right that they should be fee'd for their persistent neglect of duty – every one making a dead set at your pocket and trying to get your money for themselves – the very children more caressing and affectionate because it is Christmas and papa always gives them something on Christmas-day: – You groan as you ask yourself where is disinterestedness on this earth? – and you groan still more as you draw your cheques and reduce your balance and wonder by what law of right it is that you should be the pipe by which other folks are to be supplied.
No; you see no good or pleasure in this boasted Christmas-time as we keep it up in our benighted country. Its mirth is a sham and its inflictions are only too real. A time of tumult and expense, of indigestion and discomfort, you wait, grimly or fretfully as your mood may be, till it has passed and the current of your life is allowed to flow evenly as before. When you hear people sing its praises you long to stop their mouths, as you longed to silence the waits who woke you up out of your first sleep and spoilt your rest for the night. What manner of men are these, you think, who can find cause of congratulation in so much absurdity, if the fun is real to them – so much dreary make-believe, if it is unreal? You despise your genial, laughing, merry-hearted neighbour who goes into everything con amore, and accepts it all, from forfeits and snapdragon to plum-pudding and Christmas-boxes, as if he really liked it. You think what a fool he must be to be pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw like this. But for the most part you do not believe in his mirth; and then you despise him still more as a hypocrite as well. For a hypocrite shamming folly is an offender against reason as well as truth, whom you find it hard to forgive, let the motive of his mummery be what it may.
This is one side of the question; your neighbour takes the other.
Who on earth, he says with his hands in his pockets, his back to the fire and his kindly smiling face to the room, who on earth can grumble at the facts of Christmas-time? For his part he finds it the jolliest season of the year, and he finds each season as jolly as the other, and all perfect in their own appointed way. He is none of your crying philosophers who go through life bewailing its miseries and oppressed by its misfortunes. Not he! He thinks the earth beautiful, men and women pleasant, and God very good; and of all occasions wherein he can transact his cheerful philosophy, Christmas is the best. The boys are home for their holidays; and it is a pleasure to him to take them out hunting and shooting, and initiate them into the personal circumstances belonging to English country gentlemen. He looks forward to the time when they will take his place and carry on the traditions of the family, and he wishes them to be worthy of their name and an honour to their country. He is not one of those nervous self-centred men who live by rule and measure and cannot have a line of the day's ordering disturbed. He likes his own way certainly; and he has it; but he can press his elbows to his sides on occasions, and give room for others to expand. He does not find it such an unbearable infliction that his boys should come home and racket about the place,