Christmas | Page 7

children share in the
family privation without trying to fool 'em with make-shift presents and
boiled sugar?"
Over in a corner near the window plants, whose dead leaves she had
been picking off, sat Ellen Bourne--Mis' Matthew Bourne she was, but
nearly everybody called her Ellen Bourne. There is some law about
these things: why instinctively we call some folk by the whole name,
some by their first names, some by the last, some by shortening the
name, some by a name not their own. Perhaps there is a name for each
of us, if only we knew where to look, and folk intuitively select the one
most like that. Perhaps some of us, by the sort of miracle that is
growing every day, got the name that is meant for us. Perhaps some of
us struggle along with consonants that spell somebody else. And how
did some names get themselves so terrifically overused unless by some
strange might, say, a kind of astrological irregularity.... Ellen Bourne
sat by the window and suddenly looked over her shoulder at the room.
"If we've got the things made," she said, "can't we give 'em? If it's to
children?"
"I think if we're going to omit, we'd ought to omit," Mis Bates held her
own; "it can't matter to you, Ellen, with no children, so...." She caught
herself sharply up. Ellen's little boy had died a Christmas or two ago.
"No," Ellen said, "I ain't any children, of course. But--"
"Well, I think," said Mis' Jane Moran, "that we've hit on the only way
we could have hit on to chirk each other up over a hard time."

"And get off delicate ourselves same time," said Buff Miles. From the
first Buff had been advocating what he called "an open Christmas," and
there were those near him at the meeting to whom he had confided
some plan about "church choir Christmas carol serenades," which he
was loath to see set at naught.
Not much afterward Simeon Buck put the motion:--
"Mis' Chairman," he said, "I move you--and all of us--that the Old Trail
Town meeting do and hereby does declare itself in favour of striking
Christmas celebrations from its calendar this year. And that we
circulate a petition through the town to this effect, headed by our names.
And that we all own up that it's for the simple and regretful reason that
not a mother's son of us can afford to buy Christmas presents this year,
and what's the use of scratching to keep up appearances?"
For a breath Abel Ames hesitated; then he spoke voluntarily for the
first time that evening.
"Mr. President, I second the hull of that," said he, slowly, and without
looking at anybody; and then sighed his vast, triple sigh.
There was apparently nobody to vote against the motion. Mis' Winslow
did not vote at all. Ellen Bourne said "No," but she said it so faintly that
nobody heard save those nearest her, and they felt a bit embarrassed for
her because she had spoken alone, and they tried to cover up the
minute.
"Carried," said the Chair, and slipped out in the kitchen to put on the
coffee.
At the meeting there was almost nobody who, in the course of the
evening, did not make or reply to some form of observation on one
theme. It was:--
"Well, I wish Mary Chavah'd been to the meeting. She'd have enjoyed
herself."

Or, "Well, won't Mary Chavah be glad of this plan they've got? She's
wanted it a good while."
Or, "We all seem to have come to Mary Chavah's way of thinking,
don't we? You know, she ain't kept any Christmas for years."
Unless it was Abel Ames. He, in fact, made or replied to almost no
observations that evening. He drank his coffee without cream, sugar, or
spoon,--they are always overlooking somebody's essentials in this way,
and such is Old Trail Town's shy courtesy that the omission is never
mentioned or repaired by the victim,--and sighed his triple sigh at
intervals, and went home.
"Hetty," he said to his wife, who had not gone to the meeting, "they put
it through. We won't have no Christmas creditors this year. We don't
have to furnish charged Christmas presents for nobody."
She looked up from the towel she was featherstitching--she was a little
woman who carried her head back and had large eyes and the long,
curved lashes of a child.
"I s'pose you're real relieved, ain't you, Abel?" she answered.
"My, yes," said Abel, without expression. "My, yes."
* * * * *
They all took the news home in different wise.
"Matthew," said Ellen Bourne, "the town meeting voted not to have any
Christmas this year. That is, to ask the folks not to have any--'count of
expense."