Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 371
The Bible Lands of Palestine was a beautiful-looking book, fine binding and lovely illustrations — one of someone bathing, not naked, of course, in a lovely flat river with lovely sand beside it and lovely little sheep or lambs nibbling the daintiest of grass — you know how pink and yellow and dainty Palestine is. There was another picture of men in a boat on a lake, with tossing waves; in fact it’s getting pretty rough. I couldn’t quite make out the idea. It might have been a dinghy race, only the boat looked too round and slow. Perhaps they were just out for a sail...All I mean is that it was a lovely book, and I was just wrapping it up to give away when I saw on the front blank page, very dim, but still readable, the inscription. The Reverend James Peabody from his Mother...I started to rub it out and had got it pretty well off, but I went on rubbing too far and saw another inscription, The Reverend John Somebody from his Mother...and under that another. The Reverend Thomas Something from his Mother. I thought of cutting the page out, but it was no good as there were more half-rubbed out inscriptions on the next one, to more clergymen from their mothers; and beyond that there seemed to be, still more dim, inscriptions that ended...’from her affectionate son.’ So they must have passed the book round both ways...Of course, I still have the book and have the pleasure of looking at the pictures — that one I mentioned of the dinghy in rough weather and another of a man carrying a huge bed on his back — for a bet, evidently...But it’s no good for Christmas.
The other item was the braces — three shillings and worth ten shillings, suitable for a boy of fourteen, but with a little wheel to jack them up to a boy of sixteen. Boys grow so fast; all mothers and fathers will get the idea of that little wheel. But I want to speak about these three-shilling braces, and I want to speak seriously and especially to mothers and fathers. That’s no present to give to a boy, and you know it! You don’t understand me? Oh yes, you do. You’ve no right to give a boy something useful — something he’s got to have. To give a boy for Christmas a pair of braces, or six collars, or an overcoat, or a pair of winter gloves, or anything that’s useful and that he has to have and that you’ve got to buy for him sooner or later, is just a low-down trick unworthy of the spirit of Christmas.
With little girls, of course, it’s quite different. They’re easy. You see, the little pups love finery, and you can give them ribbons, laces, shoes — anything. They’re just inexhaustible. But when a boy thinks of Christmas he knows just what he wants. I mean, not the particular thing, but the kind of properties and qualities that it’s got to have. It has to be something more or less mechanical, more or less mysterious, with either wheels in it or electricity, a something that ‘goes’ — you know what I mean. Well, next time you want to buy a Christmas present for a little boy, you go to the toy department of any big store and say to the man — now remember, not to a woman, she can’t understand— ‘I want to buy for a little boy something that goes when you start it, has mechanism and an element of the mysterious, either cogged wheels or a battery...’ And he’ll say, ‘Exactly!’ and lead you right to it. There it is, take it out of its box — boys’ presents have to be big — it’s marked COGGO! The New Mechanico-Thermic Wonder!...Can’t you see the fascination of it?
That reminds me — you don’t mind my telling a story in the middle of an essay; I’m just writing as I go — years and years ago I got one of those things to give to my little son at Christmas. It was sent up to the house that evening when the child was asleep. But three (middle-aged) professors were dining with me, when the big parcel with COGGO was handed in, and one, a professor of mediaeval history, said, ‘Let’s look at it.’ Then another, professor of Roman Law, said, ‘How does it go?’ and the third, a professor of mechanics, said, ‘I think this way.’ So I said, ‘Wait a minute, we’ll clear the table.’ But they said, ‘No, put it on the floor — more space.’ We had a fine time with it, till we broke it.
So you see — I’m speaking here to fathers only — if you do buy the boy one of these big mechanical toys remember that even if they are expensive you yourself can have a lot of fun with them. That ought to count, eh? And not only yourself. Ask in your clergyman and any J.P. or general or Member of Parliament that you know. They’ll enjoy it...
But I repeat — don’t buy the useful things. Those braces — I never gave them away. I have them still. As I stood with them in my hand thinking where to send them, my mind conjured up a picture of how I felt, long ago, over sixty years ago, when I opened my stocking one Christmas and found, all wrapped up in boxes and parcels that might have been filled with magic, just such junk as that. There was a little round hard box with a tight lid that might have opened out to be magic music, or goodness knows what — for a child’s imagination outstrips reality — but it was only collars. I had hard work to choke back tears. And after that — flat and long and mysterious — was a box that might have held — why, anything! Derringer pistols, Cherokee daggers, anything...But did it? No. It had in it a pair of braces just like these, wheel and all. That broke me down...
There is no blame; all parents do it, must do it, in such a crowded family as ours was, with a census that went up each year. But at least let me plead for some one present, however trivial, with the true touch in it of the magic of the mysterious...My own case I wrote up and wrote off long ago, as a story, ‘Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas,’ in my book Literary Lapses, where it stands as a warning.
Did I give those braces away? No, sir. Give them to some poor child? No, sir, there is no child so poor that I should wish that evil gift upon him. I wear those braces myself, wheel and all between my shoulder blades, as a monk wears a hair shirt, to remind me of the true spirit of Christmas...
But, per contra, in the other direction, never make the mistake of asking a boy — I mean a little, little boy, too young for discretion — of asking him what he’d want for Christmas. If you do, he’ll say right off, no hesitation, a horse, and a baby motor-car, and a big radio, like grandmamma’s. Then, where are you? But come back again to the street. Let’s go shopping.
And here we reach the question of buying Christmas presents at any time through the year, just when you happen to see anything that looks nice for somebody. It is a good plan, only don’t you find — I speak just as between you and me — that the things you see, or at least, that attract your attention, are the ones that are just right for yourself? You see in a shop window a pipe, a beautiful thing in a case, and you say to yourself, ‘The very thing for a Christmas present.’ Your conscience says, ‘Present for whom?’ But you stifle it. At first you try to call it ‘Charlie’s pipe,’ meaning it for your brother. But, well, Charlie never sees it. It’s gone the way of George’s fishing-rod, the nickel-plated cigar-lighter your nephew never saw. Still, it’s all right. You can make it up to them later. You can do as I am doing to-night the moment I finish this writing, just go out and have one big grand unselfish burst of present buying, among all the little tots and the laughing crowds I spoke of. Something for everybody this time! No one forgotten, I think I’ll write them down on a list — you’ve tried it, haven’t you? George and Mary (something for their house, they haven’t been married long); Charlie, a pipe; my great-niece Nancy (three and a half; you ought to see her), either a pearl necklace, or, no, I’ll see when I get there...
And this time there must be no hesitation, no doubt.
That’s fatal to Christmas shopping. I look back over bygone years and I think of all the presents I meant to give but didn’t. No doubt, as you’ll say at once, I’m all the better man for meaning to give them. I admit it. But I think in that respect I don’t need to get any better still.
Everybody, I am sure, has had the same experience of presents never given. There was a man many many years ago who did me a great kindness. He took my classes when I was a schoolmaster and enabled me to get off for three weeks to write on college examinations. When I went to pay him he wouldn’t take anything. It meant a lot to me, both ways, But I didn’t thank him over effusively or show too much emotion. I meant that actions should speak louder than words. I decided to give him a watch at Christmas. Then I went a little further and decided on a gold watch, the kind of watch he would never buy for himself, for he was not well off — one to last all his life. The watch being gold, I couldn’t give it to him that Christmas; but what’s a year, or what was it then? His watch was coming, and it gave me pleasure, whenever I met him, to think that once given he had his watch for life. So he would have had — but he didn’t. The Christmases went by; the time never came when I could quite, or not without — well, you understand. I never gave it to him. And now I never can; where he is, he’s too happy to need it.
But it was a kind thought, anyway. I’ve had quite a few like that. There is a man going round in Montreal wearing, for me, though he doesn’t know it, a smoking jacket that I nearly gave him the Christmas after he got married. There is, or was, a retired clergyman who nearly qualified for an encyclopedia; and ever so many of my young married friends have imaginary sets of Shakespeare. But I needn’t explain it. I am sure that you yourself, and everybody else, have a list of these gifts that never were given. It is very sweet of you to have thought of them. Perhaps this Christmas you might make good on one or two. Change the encyclopaedia to a fountain-pen or, if you like, to a pencil sharpener; only give it, don’t wait. But it is getting late — the shops will close soon...
I append this note to what I wrote above. Too bad. Another Christmas gone wrong. I had no idea that the crowds were as thick as that, and as noisy. And the children — the ones I called tots — I don’t think people ought to be allowed to bring out children in such bunches as that! And those things the little devils blow into! That’s against the law. The noise, all yelling at once and laughing! What is there to laugh about? Get into the shops — you can’t! They’re jammed to the doorway. Why can’t they let a man with a list just walk in and pick out what he wants and go home? No place for him. I didn’t even try to get through the crowds; in fact, I didn’t get more than fifty feet round the main street corner.
Now that I’m back in the club I’ll have to do the best I can about presents. I have, right here in the club, a bottle of Scotch whisky for George and Mary — John, the hall porter, suggested it; he’s from Scotland. At any rate, I have the bottle all wrapped up to take home with me, and the birdcage I spoke of, I’ll find someone for that. Later, Charlie can have The Bible Lands of Palestine, and for little Nancy — either a bottle of port or two hundred cigarettes.
I’ve spoiled another Christmas by too much planning and romancing, a mistake we all make, loading it up with sentiment instead of getting down to facts. Next year I’ll know better.
Yes, John, put the port under my other arm and the cigarettes in my overcoat pocket. Good night...Merry Christmas!
MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS III - WAR-TIME CHRISTMAS: SANTA CLAUS
I ONCE ASKED a Christmas Eve group of children if they believed in Santa Claus. The very smallest ones answered without hesitation, ‘Why, of course!’ The older ones shook their heads. The little girls smiled sadly but said nothing. One future scientist asserted boldly, ‘I know who it is’; and a little make-strong with his eye on gain said: ‘I believe in it all; I can believe anything.’ That boy, I realized, would one day be a bishop.
Thus does the bright illusion of Santa Claus fade away. The strange thing is that it could ever exist. It shows how different from ours are children’s minds, as yet unformed and nebulous and all unbounded, still bright with the glory of the infinite. As yet physical science, calling itself the truth, has not overclouded them. There is no reason for them why a bean should not grow into a beanstalk that reaches the sky in one night; no reason why a dog should not have eyes as big as the round tower of Copenhagen; no reason why a white cat should not, at one brave stroke of a sword, turn into a princess. Are not all these things known by children to be in books, read aloud to them in the firelight just when their heads begin to nod toward bedtime and the land of dreams more wonderful still?
We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand — happy ignorance — that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty: the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a bypath in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.
This Land of Enchantment of the child — with its Santa Claus and its Magic Grocer — breaks and dissolves slowly. But it has to break. There comes a time when children suspect, and then when they know, that Santa Claus is Father, Worse still, there comes a time when they get to know that Father, so to speak, is not Santa Claus — no longer the all-wonderful, all-powerful being that drew them on a little sleigh, and knew everything and told them about it. Father seems different when children realise that the geography-class teacher knows more than he does, and that Father sometimes drinks a little too much, and quarrels with Mother. Pity we can’t keep their world of illusion a little longer from shattering. It’s not Santa Claus only that fades out. It’s ourselves.
Then at last there comes to children the bitter fruit from the tree of economic knowledge. This shows them that the furnace man works for money, and that the postman doesn’t carry letters just for the fun of giving them in at the door. If it were not that new ideas and interests come to children even in this dilapidation, their disillusionment might pass into an old age, broken-hearted for ever at its farewell to giants and fairies. One thinks of the overwise child of Gilbert’s Bab Ballads: ‘Too precocious to thrive, he could not keep alive, and died an enfeebled old dotard at five.’
Yet even after disillusionment, belief lingers. Belief is a survival instinct. We have to have it. Children growing older, and their mothers growing younger by living with them, cling to Santa Claus. If he is really not so, he has to be brought back again as a symbol, along with the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark. No longer possible as a ruddy and rubicund old man with a snow-white corona of whiskers, he lives again as a sort of spirit of kindliness that rules the world, or at least once a year breaks into any house to show it what it might be.
But does he? Is there such a spirit in our world? Can we believe in Santa Claus?
All through life we carry this wondering question, these tattered beliefs, these fading visions seen through a crystal that grows dim. Yet, strangely enough, often at their dimmest, some passing breath of emergency, of life or death and sacrifice of self, clears the glass of the crystal and the vision is all there again. Thus does life present to all of us its alternations of faith and doubt, optimism and pessimism, belief and negation.
Is the world a good place or a bad? An accident or a purpose? Down through the ages in all our literature echoes the cry of denunciation against the world. Sunt lachrymae rerum, mourned the Roman poet — the world is full of weeping; and Shakespeare added, ‘All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.’ Yet the greatest denunciation is not in the voice of those who cry most loudly. Strutting Hamlet in his velvet suit calls out, ‘The time is out of joint,’ and egotism echoes it on. But far more poignant is the impotent despair of those whose life has wearied to its end, disillusioned, and who die turning their faces to the wall, still silent.
Is that the whole truth of it? Can life really be like that? With no Santa Claus in it, no element of mystery and wonder, no righteousness to it? It can’t be. I remember a perplexed curate of the Church of England telling me that he felt that ‘after all, there must be a kind of something.’ That’s just exactly how I feel about it. There must be something to believe in, life must have its Santa Claus.
What’s more, we never needed Santa Claus so badly as we do at this war-time Christmas. I’m going to hang up my stocking anyway. Put yours there beside it. And I am going to write down the things I want Santa Claus to bring, and pin it up beside the stocking. So are you? Well, you wait till I’ve written mine first! Can’t you learn to be unselfish at Christmas time?
So, first I’ll tell Santa Claus that I don’t want any new presents, only just to have back some of the old ones that are broken — well, yes, perhaps I broke them myself. Give me back, will you, that pretty little framed certificate called Belief in Humanity; you remember — you gave them to ever so many of us as children to hang up beside our beds. Later on I took mine out to look what was on the back of it, and I couldn’t get it back in the frame and lost it.
Well, I’d like that and — oh, can I have a new League of Nations? You know, all set up on a rack that opens in and out. I broke the old one because I didn’t know how to work it, but I’d like to try again. And may I have a brand new Magna Carta, and a Declaration of Independence and a Rights of Man and a Sermon on the Mount? And I like, if you don’t mind, though of course it’s more in the way of a toy, a little Jack-in-the-Box, one with a little Adolf Hitler in it. No, honestly, I wouldn’t hurt him; I’d just hook the lid and keep him for a curiosity. I can’t have it? Never mind.
Here, listen, this is what I want, Santa Claus, and here I’m speaking for of us, all of us, millions and millions. Bring us back the World We Had, and didn’t value at its worth — the Universal Peace, the Good Will Toward Men — all that we had and couldn’t use and broke and threw away.
Give us that. This time we’ll really try.
MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS IV - WAR-TIME CHRISTMAS: 1941
