Mince Pie | Page 5

and
crank. We shall fidget and fume while waiting our turn in the barber's
chair; we shall argue and muddle and mope. And yet, for a few hours,
what a happy vision that was! And we turn, on Christmas Eve, to pages
which those who speak our tongue immortally associate with the
season--the pages of Charles Dickens. Love of humanity endures as
long as the thing it loves, and those pages are packed as full of it as a
pound cake is full of fruit. A pound cake will keep moist three years; a
sponge cake is dry in three days.
And now humanity has its most beautiful and most appropriate
Christmas gift--Peace. The Magi of Versailles and Washington having
unwound for us the tissue paper and red ribbon (or red tape) from this
greatest of all gifts, let us in days to come measure up to what has been
born through such anguish and horror. If war is illness and peace is
health, let us remember also that health is not merely a blessing to be

received intact once and for all. It is not a substance but a condition, to
be maintained only by sound régime, self-discipline and simplicity. Let
the Wise Men not be too wise; let them remember those other Wise
Men who, after their long journey and their sage surmisings, found
only a Child. On this evening it serves us nothing to pile up filing cases
and rolltop desks toward the stars, for in our city square the Star itself
has fallen, and shines upon the Tree.

CHRISTMAS CARDS
By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock
of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and 10's
were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to rub
them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers design
us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to the time
we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of
meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they
were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so
inadequate to the festival.
This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance
and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists
have nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide
convention. After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we
have found not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of
the true romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies
around us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs
in snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what
has a blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug
of mulled claret. Now these things are merry enough in their way, or
they were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in
Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and
circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled
in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?
Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket
of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels

and holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? Root beer may be but
meager flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate 'tis honest,
'tis actual, 'tis tangible and potable. And where, among all the
Christmas cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing
of all our triumphs? Where is the stately apartment house, looming like
Gibraltar against a sunset sky? Must we, even at Christmas time, fool
ourselves with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is
around us?
It is said that man's material achievements have outrun his imagination;
that poets and painters are too puny to grapple with the world as it is.
Certainly a visitor from another sphere, looking on our fantastic and
exciting civilization, would find little reflection of it in the Christmas
card. He would find us clinging desperately to what we have been
taught to believe was picturesque and jolly, and afraid to assert that the
things of to-day are comely too. Even on the basis of discomfort (an
acknowledged criterion of picturesqueness) surely a trolley car jammed
with parcel-laden passengers is just as satisfying a spectacle as any
stage coach? Surely the steam radiator, if not so lovely as a
flame-gilded hearth, is more real to most of us? And instead of the
customary picture of shivering subjects of