Christmas | Page 6

but taking turns with the entertaining, officers to consist of: President,
the host of the evening (or wife, if any), and no minutes to bother
with." And it was to a meeting so disposed on the subject of Christmas
that Simeon Buck rose to present his argument.
"Mr. President," he addressed the chair.
"It's Madam President, you ninny geese," corrected Buff Miles, sotto

voce.
"It had ought to be Madam Chairman," objected Mis' Moran; "she ain't
the continuous president."
"Well, for the land sakes, call me Mis' Bates, formal, and go ahead,"
said the lady under discussion. "Only I bet you've forgot now what you
was going to say."
"Not much I did not," Simeon Buck continued composedly, and,
ignoring the interruptions, let his own vocative stand. Then he
presented a memorandum of a sum of money. It was not a large sum.
But when he quoted it, everybody looked at everybody else, stricken.
For it was a sum large enough to have required, in the earning, months
of work on the part of an appalling proportion of Old Trail Town.
"From the day after Thanksgiving to the night before Christmas last
year," said Simeon, "that is the amount that the three hundred souls--no,
I guess it must have been bodies--in our town spent in the local stores.
Now, bare living expenses aside,--which ain't very much for us all,
these days,--this amount may be assumed to have been spent by the lot
of us for Christmas. Of course there was those," continued Mr. Buck,
looking intelligently about him, "who bought most of their Christmas
stuff in the City. But these--these economic traitors only make the point
of what I say the more so. Without them, the town spent this truly
amazing sum in keeping the holidays. Now, I ask you, frank, could the
town afford that, or anything like that?"
Buff Miles spoke out of the extremity of his reflections.
"That's a funny crack," he said, "for a merchant to make. Why not leave
'em spend and leave 'em pay?"
"Oh, I'll leave 'em pay all right," rejoined Simeon, significantly, and
stood silent and smiling until there were those in the room who
uncomfortably shifted.
Then he told them the word he bore from Ebenezer Rule that as they

had feared and half expected, the factory was not to open that Winter at
all. Hardly a family represented in the rooms was not also
representative of a factory employee, now idle these seven months, as
they were periodically idle at the times of "enforced" suspension of the
work.
"What I'm getting at is this," Simeon summed it up, "and Abel Ames,
here, backs me up--don't you, Abel?--that hadn't we all ought to come
to some joint conclusion about our Christmas this year, and roust the
town up to it, like a town, and not go it blind and either get in up to our
necks in debt, same as City folks, or else quit off Christmas, individual,
and mebbe hurt folks's feelings? Why not move intelligent, like a town,
and all agree out-and-out to leave Christmas go by this year? And have
it understood, thorough?"
It was very still in the little rooms when he had finished. There seems
to be no established etiquette of revolutions. But something of the
unconsciousness of the enthusiast was upon Mis' Mortimer Bates, and
she spoke before she knew:--
"So's we can be sure everybody else'll know it and not give something
either and be disappointed too," she assented. "Well, I bet everybody'd
be real relieved."
"The churches has sanctioned us doing away with Christmas this year
by doing away with it themselves," observed Mis' Jane Moran. "That'd
ought to be enough to go by."
"It don't seem to me Christmas is a thing for the churches to decide
about," said Simeon, thoughtfully. "It seems to me the matter is up to
the merchants and the grocers and the family providers. We're the ones
most concerned. Us providers have got to scratch gravel to get together
any Christmas at all, if any. And speaking for us merchants, I may say,
we'll lay in the stock if folks'll buy it. But if they can't afford to pay for
it, we don't want the stock personally."
"I guess we've all had the experience," observed Mis' Jane Moran, "of
announcing we wasn't going to give any gifts this year, and then had

somebody send something embroidered by hand, with a solid month's
work on it. But if we all agree to secede from Christmas, we can lay
down the law to folks so's it'll be understood: No Christmas for
nobody."
"Not to children?" said Mis' Abby Winslow, doubtfully.
"My idea is to teach 'em to do entirely without Christmas," harped Mis'
Bates. "We can't afford one. Why not let the