Christmas Day isn't anything very particular outside of the Episcopal Church, in our parts. Somehow the Pilgrim Fathers took a notion against it when they cut away from the old country, and built square meeting-houses all over New England. But they set up the same thing under a new-fangled name. Thanksgiving was just the same to them, and showed their independence; so they roasted and baked and stewed, and made pumpkin-pies a specialty--because the cavaliers in England couldn't get pumkins to compete with them--and went into their meeting-houses to thank God that they had good crops, instead of going down on their knees--which they didn't, because of standing up to pray--in solemn gratitude that the blessed Lord was born upon earth. Sisters, as a New England female, it would be against nature to say that the Pilgrim Fathers wasn't right in sinking Christmas in Thanksgiving, and thanking God for full crops, because the corn and potatoes were things they all could understand and accept with universal thankfulness; but about the birth of Christ, and its merciful object, no two sects that I ever heard of could agree, much less the Old Church and the New Covenanters. There it is again; my pen is getting demoralized. Christmas has come and gone. What more have I got to say about it? Why, just nothing. Wise people accept the past and look forward. Cousin Dempster insisted upon it, that I should come up and spend New Year's Day with them. Cousin E. E. was going to receive calls, and wanted some distinguished friend to help her entertain. I went. Early in the morning the empty carriage came down to my boarding-house, with those two regimental chaps on the out seat. I was all ready, with my pink silk dress on, and my front hair all in one lovely friz; but I just let the carriage wait that the boarders and people, with their faces against the window opposite, might have a good chance to look at it. Then I walked down the stairs with queenly slowness; the long skirt of my dress came a-rustling after, with a rich sound that must have penetrated to the boarding-house parlor, for the door was just a trifle open as I went by, and three faces, I could swear to, were peeping out as if they had never seen a long-trailed, pink silk dress before. Then I heard a scuttling toward the window, and, while I stood on the upper step, gathering up the back cataract of my dress, those same faces flattened themselves plump against the glass. Of course I did not hurry myself on that account, but took an observation up and down the street while I tightened the buttons of my glove, though one of the regimental chaps was a-standing there and holding the door wide open. "Why shouldn't I give the poor things just this one glimpse of the fashionable life to which genius has lifted me," says I to myself.