Pretty soon the new-old Christmas will be here. I donno but it’s here now. Here in the village we’ve give out time and again that our Christmas isn’t going to be just trading (not many of us can call it “shopping” yet without stopping to think, any more than we can say “maid” for hired girl, real easy) and just an exchange of useless gifts. So in the “new” way, little by little the old Christmas is being uncovered from under the store-keepers’ Christmas. Till at last we shall have the Christmas of the child in the manger and not of the three kings. And then we’re going to look back on the romance that Christmas had through the long time when meanings have measured themselves commercial. Just as we look back now on the romance of chivalry. And we’ll remember all the kindness and the humor of the time that’ll be outgrown--even though we wouldn’t have the time come back when we looked for Christmas in things--things--things ... and sometimes found it there. The week before Christmas, the Friendship Village post-office, near closing, is regular Bedlam. We all stand in line, with our presents done up, while the man at the window weighs everybody else’s, and we almost drop in our tracks. And our manners, times like this, is that we never get out of our place for no one. Not for no one! Only--once we did. Two nights before Christmas that year I got my next-to-the-last three packages ready and stepped into the post-office with ’em about half-past seven. And at the post-office door I met Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss. She had a work-bag and a shopping-bag and a suit-case, all of ’em bulging full. “My land!” I says, “you ain’t going to mail all them?” “I am, too,” she says, “and I’m that thankful I’m through, and my back aches that hard, I could cry. Twenty-one,” she says, grim, “twenty-one presents I’ve got made out of thought and elbow work, and mighty little money, all ready to mail on time. Now,” says she, “I can breathe.” “Kin I carry your satchel, Mis’ Holcomb?” says somebody. We looked down, and there’s little Stubby Mosher, that’s seven, and not much else to say about him. He ain’t no father, nor not much of any brother, except a no-account one in the city; and his mother has just been sent to the Wooster Hospital by the Cemetery Improvement Sodality that is extending our work to include the sick. We’d persuaded her to go there by Stubby’s brother promising to send him to spend Christmas with her. And we were all feeling real tender toward Stubby, because we’d just heard that week that she wasn’t going to get well. “Well, Stubby,” says Mis’ Holcomb, kind, “yes, I’ll be obliged for a lift, if not a lug. You well?” she asks. “Yes’m,” says Stubby, acting green, like a boy will when you ask after his health.