It seems to me, furthermore, that I hang up my stocking--that stocking which all the rest of the year has held only a foot, terror to shoemakers, and a bunion worthy its namesake, the immortal Tinker--on the most beautiful day of the year. It comes set like a jewel in the very heart of winter; when all nature is at rest; when the days are shortest and the nights are darkest; when every bird is silent upon the hillside; when no leaf is green but the holly, and the ivy, and the winter-green; when the weather is bleakest without but cheeriest within; when the storms sweep through the streets and the house-fires glow ruddiest on the hearths; when the grayest sky is made bright by Santa Claus, Kriss Kringle and the Christ-Kindchen; and Christmas-tide runs joyfully with wassail and taper-lighted tree, and song and dance. New Year has come to be hedged in by fashion. Fourth of July is a matter of buncombe. Thanksgiving is dear to the stomach. But Christmas is the day of all days--the best and the brightest of the year. I would like to be a little child, or an old woman, it matters little which, to really enjoy Christmas. I would like to have back all the angles which friction with the world has rubbed off, and to thoroughly believe in the existence of that Laplander who drives his team of reindeer athwart the housetops, tethers them to the chimneys, and fills up the small stockings on the bed-posts; and to stand before a Christmas tree under the firm conviction that there never was anything so beautiful in the world before. Or I would like to be an old woman, to sit, with my feet to the fire, in the arm-chair, with my best cap on, and just one gray curl escaping from it--that identical curl which played the deuce with gouty, rheumatic, splenetic, dear old John Anderson, in the chair opposite, half a century ago, when we were the pride of the whole country-side; with not a single wrinkle on my smooth face; with my silk gown on, which will stand alone; with my flock of children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren trooping about me; with blessed memories of a long and well-spent life: with tender recollections of eighty Christmases, dead and under the snow, whose ghosts flit by me in the ashes; with the beautiful privilege of extending my hands over the young heads and blessing them, as the Lord Christ stretches his hands in benediction over the earth each Christmas, and confers upon it the gift of his grace.