Homeburg Memories Part 10

XII

CHRISTMAS AT HOMEBURG

_And What It Means_

Now don't urge me to stay longer, Jim, because I'm going to anyway. Just to prove it, I'll take another of those gold-corseted cigars of yours, which would elevate me from the ma.s.ses to the cla.s.ses in three puffs if I smoked it back home. I didn't begin telling you how much I have enjoyed myself because I intended to go and wanted to start the soft music. I just wanted to begin on the job, that was all. It's going to take me an hour, at least, to tell you and Mrs. Jim what this meal has meant for me.

Oh, I know there have been better meals in history perhaps. I suppose now and then a king gets real hungry and orders up a feed that might have a shade on this one--just a shade. That's as far as I'll compromise, Mrs. Jim. You needn't argue the matter. I'm a regular mule in my opinions. But if you had given me crackers and cheese, and old, decrepit flexible crackers at that, it would have been all the same. I'd have devoured them with awe and thanksgiving, and I'd have marveled at my luck. Here it is Christmas Day, and while half a million strangers in New York have been eating their hearts along with the regular bill of fare at boarding-houses and restaurants, I have been grabbed up and taken into an actual home where they have a Christmas tree!

I always was lucky, Jim. Every time I fell out of a tree in my youth, I landed on my head or some other soft spot, but this beats any luck I ever had. Think of it! Me sitting around in the sub-cellar of gloom yesterday afternoon with my family a thousand miles away, and deciding to go to Boston for Christmas just because I'd have to travel ten hours and that would be some time killed; and then, when I went to my boarding-house for a clean collar, you called me up, just as I was leaving. There's a special department of Providence working on my case.

Got a permanent a.s.signment. And you are a Deputy Angel, Mrs. Jim.

Grat.i.tude! You couldn't get my brand of grat.i.tude anywhere. They don't keep it in stock. Say the word and I will go back and eat a third piece of mince pie, and die for you.

I don't want to seem critical. It's hard for me to criticize anything right now, anyway, I'm so soaked and soused in contentment. I always strive to admit all of New York's good points, and I've gotten a job here largely to encourage the old town and help it along. But I do think that in one respect New York is in the bush league, so to speak. Even with such people as you to help, you can't get much Christmas out of it.

When I think of Homeburg to-day, I feel proud and haughty. You can beat us on most everything else, but when it comes to Christmas, we can't notice you. You don't compete.

Christmas in this town is only a feat. It's a race against time in two heats. If you win the first one, you get your shopping done on the day before. If you win the second, you get through Christmas Day, before your patience and good spirits give out. Of course, New Yorkers, like yourselves, who indulge in families and other old customs, have a mighty good time out of it. Christmas with a family is great anywhere on earth.

But that isn't New York's fault. If you didn't have a family, you would be dining out or going to some matinee or sitting around watching the clock. That's where it is your solemn duty to envy Homeburg if you never have done it before. And that's why I would be homesick to-day if you had fed me four dinners, Mrs. Jim, and had been a whole covey, or bevy, or flock, or constellation of angels--whichever is correct.

I don't mean to say that we get any more at Christmas than you do. We enjoy and endure our presents, same as any one else. And we have just as hard a time buying them. There aren't enough people in Homeburg to make a Christmas jam, but we have our own line of troubles. The question in Homeburg is not how to keep from spending so much money but how to spend what we have. The storekeepers don't pamper us. In fact they are severe with us. If we don't buy what they offer the first year, they store it up, and we have to take it the next Christmas. When the Homeburg storekeepers have had a bad season, it's up to us to go back the next year and face the same old line of junk, knowing it will be there until we give in and buy it. There are two Christmas gift edition copies of Trilby still on sale in Homeburg, and Sam Green the druggist has had a ten-dollar manicure set on sale for ten years now. He won't get another, either. Says he was stung on the first one, and he's going to get his money back before he goes in any deeper. It goes down about fifty cents a year in price, and last year Jim Reebe almost bought it at four dollars and seventy-five cents for Selma Snood. We have hopes of him this year--unless he and Selma quarrel or get married, either of which will be fatal.

No, we have our troubles, same as you do, and Homeburg is full, on the day before Christmas, of worried fathers who duck into the stores about seven P.M. and try to buy enough stuff to eat up a ten dollar bill before the doors close. But that's a minor detail. What makes me love our Christmas is its communism. Christmas isn't a family rite in Homeburg. It's a town festival, a cross between Home-coming Week and a general amnesty celebration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In Homeburg you come home to the whole town.]

People come home for Christmas all over the world, but in Homeburg you don't merely come home to your family, you come home to the whole town.

A week before the twenty-fifth the clans begin to gather. Usually the college folks come first. Sometimes we have as many as a dozen, and the whole town is on edge to see them. It's next to a circus parade in interest because you never can tell what new sort of clothes the boys are going to spring on us. In the grand old days when DeLancey Payley and Sam Singer used to blow in for Christmas, they walked up from the depot between double lines of admirers, and their clothes never failed to strike us with awe. I remember the year when Sam came home with one of those overcoats with a sort of hood effect in the back. I never saw one before or since. He was also wearing a felt hat as flat as a soup plate that year and a two-quart pipe fitted carefully into his face, and when old Bill Dorgan, the drayman, saw him, he threw up both hands and cried, "My gosh, it ain't possible!"

Then the children begin coming back. There is a great difference between Homeburg and New York regarding children. In New York a child is personal property. But in Homeburg a child belongs to the whole town. A birth notice is a real news item in Homeburg. I suppose every baby is personally inspected by at least two hundred citizens. We criticize their care and feeding, suggest spanking when they are a little older, quiver unanimously with horror when they begin to "flip" freight trains, or get scarlet fever, and watch them grow up as eagerly as you New Yorkers watched the Woolworth Building. When they are graduated from high school we are all there with bouquets and presents, and we have an equity in the whole brood. Molly Strawn, the washerwoman's daughter, got more flowers than any one last year. And when they leave town to get a job, if they are boys, or when some rude outsider breaks in with a marriage license and despoils us of them, if they are girls, we all feel the loss.

That's why Christmas means so much more to us. At Christmas time the town children come home. Will Askinson comes home from Chicago. He's doing very well up there, and it takes him two hours to get the length of Main Street on the first day after he arrives. Every one has to hear about it. Sadie Gast.i.t comes home from Des Moines with a baby; regular custom of hers. Sometimes she makes the same baby do for two years, but usually it's a new one. I remember Sadie when she was only knee high to a gra.s.shopper, and her mother spanked her for climbing the Republican flagpole during the McKinley campaign. The Flint children come down from Chicago to visit their aunt. There were only a boy and girl when they left fifteen years ago. Now there are eleven, counting wife, husband, and acquisitions. Last year Ad Bridge brought a new wife home from Denver to show us. Year before last Miss Annie Simms, who has been teaching in Minneapolis, brought down a young man to show to her family.

She was going to be exclusive about it, but did it work? Not much. She had to show him all around. We just happened over there in droves.

Everybody loves Annie and we were afraid for a little while that she was going to be an old maid. The young man will bring her down this year I suppose. They were married last June.

All the Homeburg children and grandchildren arrive in the last two days before Christmas. They go home to their folks to deposit their baggage, and then they all come down-town to the post-office, to get the mail ostensibly but in reality to shake hands all around. The day before Christmas is one long reception on Main Street. The old town fairly hums.

As a matter of fact, Christmas is a good deal like a Union Depot. The approaches are the most important part of it. By the day before Christmas every one is feeling so good that things begin to happen.

People whom you have never suspected of caring for you come up to your office and leave things--cigars, and toys for the children, and Christmas cards. Men with whom you have quarreled during the year shake hands violently all around a circle on the street, and when they come to you they grab yours, too; and you begin to talk elaborately as if nothing had happened--a good deal like two women wading through a formal call; and it makes you feel so good that pretty soon you buy a box of Colorado Durable cigars and you go over to the office of some man for whom you have cherished an undying hatred, because he didn't vote for you for the school board. You peek in his door, and if he isn't there you go in and leave the cigars with your compliments.

There's never been a Christmas at home when I haven't been operated on for a grouch of this sort, and most always it comes the day before. If I had my way there wouldn't be any Christmas--only the day before. On the day before you're so tickled over what the other folks are going to get from you, and so full of pleased antic.i.p.ation over what you may get from the others, that good humor just bursts out all over you like spring waters from the mountainside.

On Christmas Eve in Homeburg we all go to the Exercises to hear the children perform. They build churches in Homeburg with big doors, so that they can get big Christmas trees in them, and we grown-ups go early in order to hear the kids squeal with wonder when they come in and see those thirty-foot miracles in candles and tinsel, down in front.

Homeburg children are divided into two cla.s.ses--those who get all of their presents on the church Christmas trees and have to worry through the next day without any additional excitement, and those who have to sit through the Christmas Eve exercises with only a sack of candy to sustain them and who land heavily the next day. The discussion as to which is the better way has raged for a generation, anyway; at least my chum and I discussed it every year when we were boys, he adhering to the Christmas tree plan, and I to the homemade Christmas. And last year, when he came back, we began it all over again, he claiming it was cruel for me to make my children wait until Christmas Day, and I pitying his poor youngsters for getting done with Christmas before it began.

Anyway, Christmas Eve is a grand occasion in the churches, and every year I notice with amazement that some youngster whom I remember as having been formally introduced to society through her birth notice only a few weeks ago, seems to me, has gotten large enough to get up on the platform and speak a piece. They do it at the most unheard-of ages. I believe there are two-year-old orators in the Congregational Sunday school. I get a good deal of suspense out of some of your baseball games here, especially when Chicago plays you, but the most suspense per individual I've ever noticed has been in these Christmas Eve exercises when some youngster just high enough to step over a crack in the floor gets up to recite a piece, and fourteen parents and relatives lean forward and forget to breathe until he has gotten his forty words out, wrong end to, and has been s.n.a.t.c.hed off the stage by his relieved mother.

Compet.i.tion gets into everything, and it has marred our Christmas exercises a little lately. The Methodists are growing fast and are very ambitious. A few years ago they rented the Opera House, put in two Christmas trees, with a real fireplace between and a Santa Claus who came out of it, and charged ten cents admission. That embittered us Congregationalists. It smacked of commercialism to us, and we would not budge an inch--besides, there wasn't another Opera House to rent. So, nowadays, our spirit of good-fellowship on Christmas Eve is sort of absent-minded and anxious. We are always counting up our attendance and sizing up our tree, and then sliding over to the Opera House and looking over the Methodist layout. Sometimes we beat them, but generally they have a regular ma.s.s meeting and make a barrel of money. Last year they turned people away and brought Santa Claus on the stage in a real automobile. We were so jealous that we could hardly cool down in time for Christmas dinner.

As a matter of fact, the only unimportant part of our Christmas season is Christmas Day itself. It is a sort of hiatus in the great doings.

When we go home on Christmas Eve, it is with a great peace. We have bought our presents. We have greeted all the returned prodigals. We have made up with a few carefully selected enemies. Our children have spoken their pieces successfully at the Exercises, and have gotten a good start on the job of eating their way through a young mountain range of mixed candies and nuts. All the hustle and worry is over, and we are unanimously happy. The week following Christmas will be one dizzy round of parties and teas for the visitors, and Homeburg will be a delightful place full of the friends of boyhood, with an average of one reunion every fifteen minutes in and out of business hours. But on Christmas Day nothing will happen except the dinner. We'll get our presents in the morning, and then at noon the great crisis will come. We'll either conquer the dinner, or it will conquer us.

You know how it is, Jim, because that's the kind of dinner you had to-day. It was an Athletic Feat--not the ordinary kind of city dinner where you save up carefully during seven courses, and finish strong on the water crackers and cheese, but a real Christmas gorge. Every time I sit down to a Christmas dinner in Homeburg, I feel more strongly than ever that each guest should have his capacity stenciled on him. They are more careful of box cars in this country than they are of humans. You never see a box car that doesn't have "Capacity, 100,000 lbs." stenciled on its sides. And they don't overload that car. There have been times when, if I could have had "Capacity, two turkey thighs, one wish-bone, tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and two pieces of pie" stenciled on me, I would have gotten along better. I think they ought to try to make these Olympic games more useful to our nation by inst.i.tuting a Christmas dinner marathon. If we have to eat for two hours and a quarter, top speed, once or twice a year, we ought to train up to the task as a nation.

I always feel a little bit nervous about Christmas dinner before it comes, but I never shirk. As a matter of fact, it isn't really dangerous. As far as I know, no one has ever actually exploded in Homeburg on Christmas Day, and we all seem to get away with the job in pretty fair shape. But it spoils the day for anything else. The town is full, in the afternoon, of partially paralyzed men lying around on sofas in a comatose condition, like anacondas sleeping off their bi-monthly lunch. Homeburg is absolutely dead for the rest of the day. If a fire broke out on Christmas afternoon, I don't believe even Chief Dobbs would have the energy to get up and put on his helmet. It's hard on the exiled men who just run down for Christmas Day from the cities. They don't get in on anything but the eating. Sam Frazier struck last year. Said he wasn't going to pay ten dollars fare and incidentals any more, to come down from Chicago on Christmas Day for an all-afternoon view of his brother's feet as said brother lay piled up on the sofa. He was going to come down after this on the Fourth of July.

It doesn't affect the women so badly because they don't eat so much.

They haven't time. It takes two women to steer one child safely through a Christmas dinner, anyway, and about three to get the ruins cleared away in time to get up a light lunch in the evening for the reviving hosts. If there is any one time when I would care less to be a woman than at any other time, it is on Christmas afternoon, when her men-folks have gone to sleep and have left her with a few cross children and a carload of Christmas dinner fragments for company.

That's where you city folks with your servant problem have the best of us, and I'll not dispute it, Mrs. Jim. On the other hand, the nicest part of our Homeburg Christmas is the fact that, when we fold our tired hands over our bulging vests after dinner and lie down to rest, we know that there is no starving family in Homeburg which has had to celebrate Christmas by taking on an extra drink of water and indulging in a long, succulent sniff at a restaurant door.

We have poor people in Homeburg, but we haven't any poverty problem at Christmas. It's a strictly local issue, and it is handled by the neighbors. Having lived a long time in the city, Jim, you may not know what a neighbor is. It's a person who lives close to you and takes a personal interest in your affairs. A good neighbor is a woman whose heart is so large that she has had to annex a lot of outlying territory around the family real estate in order to fill it. No Homeburg woman would think of constructing an extraordinarily fine pie without sending a cut over to her nearest neighbor.

About Christmas time we are especially busy neighboring in Homeburg, and any family which lives near us and isn't going very strong on the Christmas game, because of sickness or trouble, is our meat. It would be an insult to go across the town and help a family in some other neighbor's territory, and that was what got Editor Simpson of the _Argus_ into trouble a couple of years ago.

Simpson is a young man, a comparative newcomer from the city, and a very earnest and enterprising party. He runs the _Argus_ on the high gear and is never so happy as when he is promoting a public movement in real city style. It occurred to Simpson three years ago that Homeburg ought not to be behind Chicago in anything, especially at Christmas time, and so he started a "Good-fellow" movement. They were running it strong in Chicago that year. Any man who wished to be a "Good Fellow" sent his name to the "Good-fellow Editor" and offered to provide a Christmas for one or more poor children. It was a grand idea, stuffed full of sentiment, and we Homeburg men just naturally ate it up. When the day before Christmas came, seventy-five "Good Fellows" were on Simpson's list, and they had offered to take care of one hundred and twenty-five children, to give each a real Christmas. Simp's office was full of groceries and toys, applicants were clamoring for children, all was excitement and enthusiasm--and then a horrible state of affairs was disclosed. Simpson hadn't provided any children. There was a bleak and distressing lack of material for us to work upon. In all Homeburg there weren't ten families who were going without Christmas turkey, or its equivalent, and in each one of these cases some neighbor had sternly ordered Simp to keep his hands off and mind his own affairs. There we were--seventy-five Good Fellows with boatloads of cheer and no way to dispose of it. The only person we could find in all the town to descend on was Pat Ryan. We smothered him in groceries, and he ate himself into biliousness that night and had to have a doctor for three days, which helped some, but not much. On the whole, it was a dismal failure.

What! Nine o'clock? Excuse me, Jim. I seem to have taken root here. No; I am going this time. Back to my room with Christmas all gotten through with, thank goodness and you folks. You understand. You've made it as nice for me as any two magicians could have done, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But it's my last Christmas in New York, I hope.

Next month the wife and children come on, and by next Christmas, if I have any luck at all, we'll join the happy army that swoops down on Homeburg for the holidays. My, but it will be funny to look at the old town from the outside in! Me--a visitor in Homeburg!

Do you know what prosperity is to a whole mob of city people, Jim? It's the ability to pack up their families and go off to some Homeburg or other for Christmas. And do you know what makes city people successful, in Homeburg opinion? It's coming back every year. And if we made a million apiece, and didn't preserve enough of the old home-town love to come back, we wouldn't be successful in their eyes, not by a long way.

Well, good-by, philanthropists. And, thank you, I can't come again next year. I'm saving up to go home. That's what makes this cigar taste so good, Jim. Last one I'll smoke until carfare is in the bank.

THE END