“I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing them Church hymns to me that way. It’s forty years since I heard a hymn sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I sort of realize what we’re fighting for now, and I never did before. It’s for women like that and their kids. “It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting their singing them hymns. I remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there’s many women like that in France now--telling their beads and singing the old hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she’s just after treating us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I think that’s why it was called ‘Holy Ireland.’” THE GENTLE ART OF CHRISTMAS GIVING If a dentist stuck a bit of holly in his cap and went through the streets on Christmas morning, his buzzing drill over his shoulder and his forceps in his hand, stopping at the houses of his friends to give their jaws free treatment, meanwhile trolling out lusty Yuletide staves--if he were to do this, I say, it would be said of him, among other things, that he was celebrating Christmas in a highly original manner. Undoubtedly there would be many other adjectives applied to his manner of generosity--adjectives applied, for instance, by the children whom, around their gayly festooned tree, he surprised with his gift of expert treatment. But the adjective most generally used (not perhaps in adulation) would be “original.” And the use of this adjective would be utterly wrong. The holly bedecked dentist would not be acting in an original manner. He would not be following the suggestion of his own philanthropic heart. He would be acting in accordance with tradition, a particularly annoying tradition, the evil and absurd superstition that a gift should be representative of the giver rather than of the recipient. Now, I am aware that there is high literary authority for the dentist’s Christmas morning expedition. The dentist himself would be the first to disclaim having originated the idea; if you were to question him he would tell you, as he deftly adjusted his rubber dam in your mouth, that the credit belonged to the late Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Emerson,” the dentist would say as he sharpened the point of his drill, “said that a gift was meaningless unless it was a genuine expression of the giver; it would be unfitting, for instance, for a poet to give his friend a house and lot, and a painter, his friend, a diamond necklace. The poet should give a poem and the painter should give a painting. Therefore it naturally follows that a minister should give a sermon and a school teacher should bestow upon his expectant pupils an extra page of mathematical problems. This,” the dentist would say, “is the gift most expressive of my personality.” And the drill would seek its goal.