THE FACT - The Feast of St. Friend

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Even today the spirit and rites of ancient Christmas are kept up, more or less in their full rigour and splendour, by a race of beings that is scattered over the whole earth. This race, mysterious, masterful, conservative, imaginative, passionately sincere, arriving from we know not where, dissolving before our eyes we know not how, has its way in spite of us. I mean the children. By virtue of the children's faith, the reindeer are still tramping the sky, and Christmas Day is still something above and beyond a day of the week; it is a day out of the week. We have to sit and pretend; and with disillusion in our souls we do pretend. At Christmas, it is not the children who make-believe; it is ourselves. Who does not remember the first inkling of a suspicion that Christmas Day was after all a day rather like any other day? In the house of my memories, it was the immemorial duty of my brother on Christmas morning, before anything else whatever happened, to sit down to the organ and perform "Christians Awake" with all possible stops drawn. He had to do it. Tradition, and the will that emanated from the best bedroom, combined to force him to do it. One Christmas morning, as he was preparing the stops, he glanced aside at me with a supercilious curl of the lips, and the curl of my lips silently answered. It was as if he had said: "I condescend to this," and as if I had said: "So do I."

Such a moment comes to most of us of this generation. And thenceforward the change in us is extraordinarily rapid. The next thing we know is that the institution of waits is a rather annoying survival which at once deprives us of sleep and takes money out of our pockets. And then Christmas is gluttony and indigestion and expensiveness and quarter-day, and Christmas cards are a tax and a nuisance, and present-giving is a heavier tax and a nuisance. And we feel self-conscious and foolish as we sing "Auld Lang Syne." And what a blessing it will be when the "festivities" (as they are misleadingly called) are over, and we can settle down into commonsense again!

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I do not mean that our hearts are black with despair on Christmas Day. I do not mean that we do not enjoy ourselves on Christmas Day. There is no doubt that, with the inspiriting help of the mysterious race, and by the force of tradition, and by our own gift of pretending, we do still very much enjoy ourselves on Christmas Day. What I mean to insinuate, and to assert, is that beneath this enjoyment is the disconcerting and distressing conviction of unreality, of non-significance, of exaggerated and even false sentiment. What I mean is that we have to brace and force ourselves up to the enjoyment of Christmas. We have to induce deliberately the "Christmas feeling." We have to remind ourselves that "it will never do" to let the heartiness of Christmas be impaired. The peculiarity of our attitude towards Christmas, which at worst is a vacation, may be clearly seen by contrasting it with our attitude towards another vacation--the summer holiday. We do not have to brace and force ourselves up to the enjoyment of the summer holiday. We experience no difficulty in inducing the holiday feeling. There is no fear of the institution of the summer holiday losing its heartiness. Nor do we need the example of children to aid us in savouring the August "festivities."

		"Grant to your spirit the habit of the doubt, and to your heart, the habit of the tolerance." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg