ckory-nuts and chestnuts for sale to patient parents, building wigwams
in the woods, and sometimes playing Indians in too realistic manner by
staining ourselves (and incidentally our clothes) in liberal fashion
with poke-cherry juice. Thanksgiving was an appreciated festival, but it
in no way came up to Christmas. Christmas was an occasion of literally
delirious joy. In the evening we hung up our stockings--or rather the
biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups--and before dawn we
trooped in to open them while sitting on father's and mother's bed;
and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own
table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after
breakfast. I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such
attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce
them exactly for my own children.

My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great
unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or
cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he
made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded
for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could
not be right in a man. With great love and patience, and the most
understanding sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on
discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but he was the
only man of whom I was ever really afraid. I do not mean that it was
a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him. We
used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key
rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him;
and we would troop into his room while he was dressing, to stay there as
long as we were permitted, eagerly examining anything which came out
of his pockets which could be regarded as an attractive novelty. Every
child has fixed in his memory various details which strike it as of
grave importance. The trinkets he used to keep in a little box on his
dressing-table we children always used to speak of as "treasures."
The word, and some of the trinkets themselves, passed on to the next
generation. My own children, when small, used to troop into my room
while I was dressing, and the gradually accumulating trinkets in the
"ditty-box"--the gift of an enlisted man in the navy--always excit