“Well, then, go in with a family,” she says; “any of us’ll be real glad to have you,” she adds, generous. “_We_ would. Come to ours--we’re going to have a great big tree for the children. I’ve been stringing the pop-corn and cutting the paper for it whenever I got an odd minute. The Holcombs, they’re going to have one too--and Mis’ Uppers and Mis’ Merriman and even the Hubbelthwaits and Abigail Arnold, for her little nieces. I never see a year when everybody was going to celebrate so nice. Come on with one of us, why don’t you?” “Well,” I says, “mebbe I will. I’ll see. I don’t know yet what I will do,” I told her. And I went off down the street. What I wanted to say was, “I hate to box Christmas up in a family,” but I didn’t quite dare--yet. Friendship Village ain’t ever looked much more like Christmas, to my notion, than it did that December. Just the right snow had come--and no more; and just the right cold--and no more. The moon was getting along so’s about the night of the twenty-fifth it was going to loom up big and gold and warm over the fields on the flats, where it always comes up in winter like it had just edged around there to get sort of a wide front yard for its big show, where the whole village could have a porch seat. You know when you live in a village you always know whether the moon is new or to the full or where it is and when it’s going to be; but when you live in a city you just look up in the sky some night and say “Oh, that’s so, there’s the moon,” and go right on thinking about something else. Here in the village that December everything was getting ready, deliberate, for a full-moon Christmas, like long ago. The moon and the cold and the snow, and all them public things, was doing their best, together, for our common Christmas. All but us. It seemed like all of us humans was working for it separate. Tramping along there in the snow that night, I thought over what Mis’ Sykes had said, and about all the places she’d mentioned over was going to have Christmas trees. And I looked along to the houses, most of ’em lying right there on Daphne Street, where they were going to have ’em--I could see ’em all, one tree after another, lighted and streaming from house to house all up and down Daphne Street, just the way they were going to look. And then there was the little back streets, and the houses down on the flats, where there wouldn’t be any trees nor much of any Christmas. Of course, as Mis’ Sykes had said, the poor and the neglected are always with us--yet; but I didn’t want to pounce down on any of ’em with a bag of fruit and a box of animal crackers and set and watch ’em. That wasn’t what I meant by having a Christmas _with_ somebody. “There’d ought to be some place--” I was beginning to think, when right along where I was, by the Market Square, I come on five or six children, kicking around in the snow. It was ’most dark, but I could just make ’em out: Eddie Newhaven, Arthur Mills, Lily Dorron, and two-three more.