The worst ones to get weaned away from a perfectly selfish way of observing Christ’s birthday was the private families. Land, land, I kept saying to myself them days, we all of us act like we was studying kindergarten mathematics. We count up them that’s closest to us, and we can’t none of us seem to count much above ten. Not all of ’em was that way, though. Well--if it just happens that you live in any town whatever in the civilized world, I think you’ll know about what I had said to me. On the one hand it went about like this, from Mis’ Timothy Toplady and the Holcombs and the Hubbelthwaits and a lot more: “Well, land knows, it’d save us lots of back-aching work--but--will the children like it?” “Like it?” I says. “Try ’em. Trust ’em without trying ’em if you want to. I would. Remember,” I couldn’t help adding, “you like to be with the children a whole lot oftener than they like to be with you. What they like is to be together.” And, “Well, do you honestly think it’ll work? I don’t see how it can--anything so differ’nt.” And, “Well, they ain’t any harm trying it one year, as I can see. That can’t break up the holidays, as I know of.” But the other side had figured it out just like the other side of everything always figures. “Calliope,” says Mis’ Postmaster Sykes, “are you crazy-headed? What’s your idee? Ain’t things all right the way they’ve always been done?” “Well,” says I, conservative, “not all of ’em. Not wholesale, I wouldn’t say.” “But you can’t go changing things like this,” she told me. “What’ll become of Christmas?” “Christmas,” I says, “don’t need you or me, Mis’ Sykes, to be its guardians. All Christmas needs is for us to get out of its way, and leave it express what it means.” “But the _home_ Christmas,” she says, ’most like a wail. “Would you do away with that?” Then I sort of turned on her. I couldn’t help it. “Whose home?” I says stern. “If it’s your home you mean, or any of the thousands of others like it where Christmas is kept, then you know, and they all know, that nothing on earth can take away the Christmas feeling and the Christmas joy as long as you want it to be there. But if it’s the homes you mean--and there’s thousands of ’em--where no Christmas ever comes, you surely ain’t arguing to keep them the way they’ve been kept?” But she continued to shake her head. “You can do as you like, of course,” she said, “and so can everybody else. It’s their privilege. But as for me, I shall trim my little tree here by our own fireside. And here we shall celebrate Christmas--Jeddie and Nora and father and me.” “Why can’t you do _both_?” I says. “I wouldn’t have you give up your fireside end of things for anything on earth. But why can’t you do both?” Mis’ Sykes didn’t rightly seem to know--at least she didn’t say. But she give me to understand that her mind run right along in the self-same groove it had had made for it, cozy. * * * * *