The BOOK of Christmas

With an Introduction by Hamilton W Mabie

and an Accompaniment of Drawings by George Wharton Edwards

New York The Macmillan Company 1909

Copyright, 1909, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

[Pg v]

INTRODUCTION

CAROLS are still sung in almost numberless churches, lights glow on altars bound and wreathed with spruce and holly, trees are set up in innumerable homes, and mobs of merry children sing and dance around them, stockings take on grotesque shapes and hang gaping with treasures for early marauders on Christmas morning, and hosts of men and women keep the day in their hearts in all peace and piety.

The festival, dear to the heart of sixty generations, has survived the commercial uses which it has been compelled to serve; the weariness of buying and selling in the vast bazaar of nations, stocked with all manner of things which stimulate the offerings of friendship; the wide-spread sense of irony which success without happiness breeds; the indifference of feeling and satiety of emotion fostered by great prosperity without that grace of culture which subdues wealth to the finer uses of life. It has survived the cynical spirit that distrusts sentiment and sneers at emotion as weaknesses which have no place in a scientific age and among men and women who know life. It has survived that preoccupation with affairs which leaves little time for feelings, and that resolute determination to make men good which leaves scant room for efforts to make them happy.

[Pg vi]

But even in this age of hard-headed practical sagacity and hard-minded goodness ruthlessly bent on doing the Lord's work by the methods of a police magistrate, Christmas carols are still sung; and the organization of virtue in numberless societies with presidents and secretaries, and, above all, with treasurers, has not dimmed the glow of the love which bears fruit in a forest of Christmas trees, with mobs of merry children shouting around them.

The plain truth is that the world is not half so heartless as it pretends to be. In its desire to wear that air of weary omniscience which is supposed to bear witness to a wide experience of life it often pooh-poohs appeals which make its well-regulated heart beat with painful irregularity. There is as much hypocrisy in the scornful as in the sentimental; and the worldly-wise man often sniffles behind the handkerchief with which he pretends to stifle a sneeze. We pretend to have become too wise to be moved by lighted candles or stirred by children's voices singing of angels and shepherds; but in our heart of hearts the old story is dear to us, and we are eager eavesdroppers when the ancient mysteries of love and sympathy and friendship are talked about by the poets or novelists.

We speak patronizingly of those old-fashioned Christmas essays in the "Sketch Book," and we pretend to be amused by the recollection that "The Christmas Carol" once filled us with an almost insane desire to make somebody happy. But it is noticeable that the old text-books of Christmas sentiment reappear year after year in an almost endless variety of forms; and that in an age when the strong man boasts of his distrust of emotion, and the strong woman holds sentiment in the contempt one feels for out-grown toys, books that have to do with Christmas are read with[Pg vii] surreptitious pleasure. We apologize publicly for our interest in them and deprecate the attempt to revive a faded interest and recall a decayed tradition; but in private we read with avidity these survivals of archaic feeling and prehistoric emotion. When "The Birds' Christmas Carol" appeared, we laughed over it so as to hide our tears. Mr. Janvier's charming account of Christmas ways in Provence captivated us, and we found excuse for its tender regard for old

habits and observances in the fact that Mr. Janvier has been in the habit of spending a good deal of time with a group of unworldly old poets who still dream of joy and beauty as the precious things of life, and hold to the fellowship of artists instead of forming a labor union. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, Mr. F. Marion Crawford, and Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith have written undisguised Christmas stories with as little sense of detachment from modern life as if they were telling detective tales; and, what is more astonishing to the worldly-wise man, these stories have a glow of life, a vitality of charm and sweetness in them, that make scorn and cynicism seem cheap and vulgar. And here comes Dr. Crothers and stirs the smouldering Christmas fire into a blaze and sits down before it as if it were real logs in combustion and not a trick with gas, and makes gentle sport of the wisdom of the sceptic. These recent revivals of Christmas literature show a surprising vitality, and have met with a surprising response from a generation popularly believed to be given over to the making of money and the

extirpation of human feeling. It is even said that there are men and women of such insistent hopefulness that they anticipate a time when the aged in feeling, the worn-out in sentiment, the infirm in imagination, and the crippled in heart will be brought again within sound of Christmas bells.

[Pg viii]

There is little hope of bringing in the reign of good feeling by lighting a single Christmas fire, but a long line of such fires touching the receding horizon of the past with a happy glow is like a revival of a fading memory; it makes us suddenly aware of half-forgotten associations with the days that were once full of life and rippling with merriment like a mountain stream suffused with sunlight. We surrender ourselves so completely to the noisy activities of our own age that we forget how infinitesimal a portion of time it is and how misleading its emphasis often is. It is only a point on the face of the dial; but we accept it as if it were a present eternity, a final stage in the evolution of men. That many of its sacred texts are the maxims of a short-sighted prudence, many of its major interests as short-lived as the passions of children, many of its ideas of life the cheapest parvenus in the world of thought, does not occur to us; its cynicisms are often reflections of its spiritual shallowness, and its scepticisms mere records of its meanness or corruption.

Like all the times that have gone before it, it is a fragment of a fragment, and the only way to see life whole is to get away from it and look down on it as it takes its little place in the larger order of history.

In this greater order of time the long line of Christmas fires glows like a great truth binding the fleeting generations into a unity of faith and feeling. When we light our fire, we are one with our ancestors of a thousand years ago; we evade the isolation of our time and escape its provincial narrowness; we rejoin the race from whose growth we have unconsciously separated ourselves; we open long-unused rooms and are amazed to find how large the house of life is and how hospitable. It has hearth room for all experience and for every kind of emotion; for the thoughts that move[Pg ix] in the order of logic; for the emotions that rise and fall like great tides that flow in from the infinite; for the vigor that is born of will, and for the power evoked by discipline. It is when the different ages, with their diversities of interest and growth, send their children to sit together before the Christmas fire that we realize how wide life is, and how impossible it is for any age to compass it. The faith against which one age shuts the door stands serene and smiling in the centre

of the next age; the joy which one generation denies itself lies radiant on the face of a later generation; the imagination which the reign of logic in one epoch sends into the wilderness returns with full hands to be the master of a wiser period.

Before the Christmas fire that for two thousand years has sunk into embers to blaze again into a great light at the end of the twelfth month, men are not only reunited in the unbroken continuity of their fortunes, but in the wholeness of their life; in their power of vision as well as of sight, in their power of feeling as well as of thought, in their power of love as well as of action.

This large hospitality of the Christmas fire, before which kings and beggars sit at ease and every human faculty finds its place, makes room for every gift and grace; for reason, with severe and wrinkled face; for sentiment, tender and reverent of all sweet and beautiful things; for the imagination, seeing heavenly visions, and the fancy catching glimpses of quaint or grotesque or fairy-like images, in the flame; for poetry, singing full-throated with Milton, or homely, familiar and domestic with the makers of the carols; for the story-tellers, spinning their fascinating tales within the circle of the embracing glow; for humor, full of smiles or filling the room with Homeric laughter; for[Pg x] the players, whose mimic art shows the manger, the shepherds and the kings to successive generations crowding the playhouse with the eager joy of children or with the sacred memories of age; for the preachers, to whom the season brings a text apart from the disputes and antagonisms of the schools and churches; for companies of children, impatiently

waiting for the mysterious noise in the chimney; and for graybeards recalling old days and ways,—yule logs, country dances, waits singing under the frosty sky, stage coaches bearing guests and hampers filled with dainties to country houses standing with open doors and broad hearths for the fun and frolic, the tenderness and sentiment, the poetry and piety, of Christmas-tide.

At the end of nearly two thousand years Christmas shows no signs of decrepitude or weariness; its danger lies not in forgetfulness but in perverted uses and overstimulated activities. Its commercial availability is pushed so far that its sentiment often loses spontaneity and charm in excessive organization and prodigal distribution. The Christmas shopper suffers such a perversion of feeling that she hates the season she ought to bless; and the modern Santa Claus is so intent on the ingenuity or the cost of his gifts that he overlooks the only gift that warms the heart and translates Christmas into the vernacular.

If Christmas is to be saved from desecration and kept sacred, not only to faith but to friendship, its sentiment must be revived year by year in the joyful celebration of the old rites. We have been so eager of late years to rid ourselves of superstition and "see things as they are," that we have lost that vision of the large relations of things in which alone their meaning and use is revealed. We have studied the field at our doorsteps so thoroughly that we have[Pg xi] lost sight of the landscape in which its little cup of fruitfulness is poured as into a great bowl rimmed by the horizon. One day out of three hundred and sixty-five, detached from its ancient history and isolated from the celebrations of centuries, cannot keep our hearts and hearths warm; we must rekindle the old fires and join hands with the vanished companies of friends who have kept the day and made it merry in the long ago. The echoes of ancient song and laughter give it a rich merriment, a ripe and tender wealth of associations. The mirth of one Christmas overflows into

another until the sense of an unbroken joy, sinking and rising year after year like the tide of life in the fields, is borne in upon us. This sense of the unity of men in the great experiences steals back again into our hearts when we hear the old songs and read the old stories. Alexander Smith, whose book of essays, "Dreamthorp," is one of the books of the heart,—for there are books of the heart as well as books of knowledge and books of power,—kindled his imagination into a responsive glow by rereading every Christmas Day Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity." When one opens the volume at this great song, it is like going into a church and hearing the organ played by unseen hands; the silence is flooded by a vast music which lifts the heart into the presence of great mysteries. But there is a time for private devotions as well as for public worship, for domestic as well as religious celebrations; and for every hour and place and mood there is a song and story. There are tender hymns for the devout, and spirited songs for

those who celebrate together old days and ancient friendships; there are quaint carols for those whose hearts long for the quiet and pleasant ways of an olden time, and there are roaring catches for those whose gayety rises to the flood;[Pg xii] there are meditations for the solitary, and there are stories for the little groups about the fire.

A Book of Christmas is a text-book of piety, friendship, merriment; a record of the real business of the race, which is not to make money, but to make life full and sweet and satisfying. It is a book to put into the hands of young men eager to start on the race and of young women to whom the future holds out a dazzling vision of a prosperity of pleasure and success; for it translates the word on all lips into its only comprehensible terms. In the glow of the Christmas fire the man who has made a fortune without making friends is a tragic failure, and the woman who has won the place and power she saw shining with delusive splendor on the far horizon and missed happiness faces one of life's bitterest ironies. It is a book for those who have fallen under the delusion that action is the only form of effective expression, and that to be useful one must rush along the road with the ruthless speed of an automobile; forgetting that action is only a path to being, and that the joy of life is largely found by the way. It is a book for those ardent spirits to whom

the one interest in life is making people over and fitting them into their places in a rigid order of arbitrary goodness, forgetting that to the heart of a child the Kingdom of Heaven is always open, and the ultimate grace of it is the purity which is free and unconscious. It is a book for the sceptical and cynical, whose blighted sympathy and insight regain their vitality in the atmosphere of its love and kindness, its fun and frolic, its fellowship of loyal hearts and true.

Above all, the Book of Christmas is a book of joy in the sadness of the world, a book of play in the work of the world, a book of consolation in the sorrow of the world.

Hamilton W. Mabie

[Pg xiii]

CONTENTS

[Pg xix]

LIST OF PLATES

[Pg 1]

I SIGNS OF THE SEASON

[Pg 2]

[Pg 3]

[Pg 4]

[Pg 5]

An Hue and Cry after Christmas

"Any man or woman ... that can give any knowledge, or tell any tidings, of an old, old, very old gray-bearded gentleman, called Christmas, who was wont to be a verie familiar ghest, and visite all sorts of people both pore and rich, and used to appear in glittering gold, silk, and silver, in the Court, and in all shapes in the Theater in Whitehall, and had ringing, feasts, and jollitie in all places, both in the citie and countrie, for his comming: ... whosoever can tel what is become of him, or where he may be found, let them bring him back againe into England."

THAT curious little tract "An Hue and Cry after Christmas" bears the date of 1645; and we shall best give our readers an idea of its character by setting out that title at length, as the same exhibits a tolerable abstract of its contents. It runs thus: "The arraignment, conviction, and imprisoning of Christmas on St. Thomas day last, and how he broke out of prison in the holidayes and got away, onely left his hoary hair and gray beard sticking between two iron bars of a window. With an Hue and Cry after Christmas, and a letter from Mr. Woodcock, a fellow in Oxford, to a malignant lady in London. And divers passages between the lady and the cryer about Old Christmas; and what shift he was fain to make to save his life, and great stir to fetch him back again. Printed by Simon Minc'd Pye for Cissely Plum-Porridge, and are to be sold by Ralph Fidler Chandler at the signe of the Pack of Cards in Mustard Alley in Brawn Street."

Besides the allusions contained in the latter part of this title to some of the good things that follow in the old man's train, great pains are taken by the "cryer" in describing him, and by the lady in mourning for him, to allude to[Pg 6] many of the cheerful attributes that made him dear to the people. His great antiquity and portly appearance are likewise insisted upon. "For age this hoarie-headed man was of great yeares, and as white as snow. He entered the Romish Kallendar, time out of mind, as old or very neer as Father Mathusalem was,—one that looked fresh in the Bishops' time, though their fall made him pine away ever since. He was full and fat as any divine doctor of them all; he looked under the consecrated lawne sleeves as big as Bul-beefe,—just like Bacchus upon a tunne of wine, when the grapes hang shaking about his eares; but since the Catholike liquor is taken from him he is much wasted, so that he hath looked very thin and ill of late." "The poor," says the "cryer" to the lady, "are sorry for" his departure; "for they go to every door a-begging, as

they were wont to do (good Mrs., Somewhat against this good time); but Time was transformed, Away, be gone; here is not for you." The lady, however, declares that she for one will not be deterred from welcoming old Christmas. "No, no!" says she; "bid him come by night over the Thames, and we will have a back-door open to let him in;" and ends by anticipating better prospects for him another year.

T. K. Hervey

The Doge's Christmas Shooting

AT certain fixed times the Doge was allowed the relaxation of shooting, but with so many restrictions and injunctions that the sport must have been intolerably irksome. He was allowed or, more strictly speaking, was ordered to proceed for this purpose, and about Christmas[Pg 7] time, to certain islets in the lagoons, where wild ducks bred in great numbers. On his return he was obliged to present each member of the Great Council with five ducks. This was called the gift of the "Oselle," that being the name given by the people to the birds in question. In 1521, about five thousand brace of birds had to be killed or snared in order to fulfil this requirement; and if the unhappy Doge was not fortunate enough, with his attendants, to secure the required number, he was obliged to provide them by buying them elsewhere and at any price, for the claims of the Great Council had to be satisfied in any case. This was often an expensive affair.

There was also another personage who could not have derived much enjoyment from the Christmas shooting. This was the Doge's chamberlain, whose duty it was to see to the just distribution of the game, so that each bunch of two-and-a-half brace should contain a fair average of fat and thin birds, lest it should be said that the Doge showed favour to some members of the Council more than to others.

By and by a means was sought of commuting this annual tribute of ducks. The Doge Antonio Grimani requested and obtained permission to coin a medal of the value of a quarter of a ducat, equal to about four shillings or one dollar, and to call it "a Duck," "Osella," whereby it was signified that it took the place of the traditional bird.

F. Marion Crawford in Salve Venetia!

Thursday Processions in Advent

The Eve of the festival of St. Nicholas, December 5, in mediæval days was the occasion when choir and altar boys met and in solemn mimicry of the procedure of[Pg 8] their elders elected a boy-bishop and his prebendaries who remained in office and moreover exercised practically full episcopal functions until Holy Innocents Day.

In the full vestments of the church these minor clergy made "visitations" in the neighborhood usually on three successive Thursdays, and collected small sums of money known as the "Bishop's Subsidy." Says Barnaby Googe:—