couldn't think what to give you--and because, as she
piously declares, "Thank God, you have everything you want!" Yes,
indeed, there is something about Yuletide which makes all men benign, and
the joyful hypocrisy of Christmas Eve sounds quite the genuine emotion
when uttered on Christmas Day. I am bound, however, to confess that the
"good will" becomes a trifle strident towards nightfall. Many things
conduce to this. The children are suffering from overfeeding; Mother is
sick of Aunt Maria, her husband's sister; and Father is more than fed up
with the pomposity of Uncle John. There is a general and half-uttered
yearning among everybody to go upstairs and lie down. The jollifications
of the coming evening, when the grown-ups come into their own and the
children are being sick upstairs, presume the necessity for such a
retirement--a kind of regeneration of that charitable energy required for
the festival "jump off." After which the digestive organs begin to
realise what sweated labour means, and Father makes a speech about his
pleasure at seeing so many members of the family present, and Mother
weeps silently for some trouble which always revives over Christmas
dinner and nobody has yet been able to sympathise with, because nobody
has yet known what it is. And, because Christmas night would otherwise
prove somewhat trying even to a family determined to be loving or to die
in the attempt, somebody or other has invented champagne. It is quite
wonderful how the dullest people seem to take unto themselves wings after
the third bottle of Veuve Clicquot has been opened.

So Christmas Day is thus brought to a triumphant conclusion of good will.
And the next morning, of course, is Boxing Day--a most appropriately
named event. Even if fighting isn't strictly legal, backbiting
unfortunately is. Still, the wise relation seeks the frequent seclusion
of his own bedroom during that mostly inglorious day of Christmas
aftermath. You see, there is no knowing what sparks may fly when the
digestions of a devoted family have gone on strike!

Only the children seem to be able to raise the jolly ashes of their dead
selves, phoenix-like from the carcase of the devoured turkey (whose bones
in the morning light of Boxing Day resemble somewhat the Cloth Hall at
Ypres by the end of the war). Even they (bless 'em!) seem able to
recover from the fact that the lovely toys which Uncle John gave them lie
broken at their feet because Uncle