Thanksgiving Day became a horror of an entirely different kind. As I look back on the evolution of what has finally become my attitude toward holidays, I am convinced that the impulse to my detestation of the well-meant festival was given originally by the annual proclamations of the Presidents of the United States and the governors of the state in which I happened to have been born and brought up. To be President of the United States of America is, we are told, to hold the highest possible public office in the universe, but apparently one of the conditions of election to this exalted estate is that no President shall ever officially write anything for publication that is not obvious, pompous, platitudinous and unreadable. The printed remarks of governors are even, if possible, more so. Reading, once in so often, dear, dead old phrases about the “universal prosperity now existing throughout the length and breadth of this great land,” was, I am sure, what first began to make me realize that Thanksgiving Day is a most dreadful affair. If the Fourth of July drives one distracted with its fiendish noise, the day of giving thanks has almost the same effect if one pays any special attention to it, by reason of its unnatural quiet. It comes at a dreary time of year when outside there is nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. One stays in the house and, some time during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I have), the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday. And then Christmas. As I grow older, its original significance, its reason for being a holiday at all, becomes more full of meaning, more touching, more beautiful. It is not in the least obligatory to be religiously inclined in order to be profoundly moved by the symbolism of its pathos and poetry. The incident stands out, sums up, crystallizes for us, all that in our gentlest and best moods we believe about the great facts of birth, of motherhood, of infancy, of the family relation. It is our standard, our ideal; a serious contemplation of it must arouse in us everything that is most kindly, affectionate, generous, humble. The birth of the Infant Jesus, the attendant circumstances, the general scene and the significance of it all is, I happen to know, one of the few things that can cause a hard-faced, avaricious old billionaire to sink his head on his library table and burst into uncontrollable sobs.