price, and last year Jim Reebe almost bought it at four
dollars and seventy-five cents for Selma Snood. We have hopes of him
this year--unless he and Selma quarrel or get married, either of which
will be fatal.

No, we have our troubles, same as you do, and Homeburg is full, on the
day before Christmas, of worried fathers who duck into the stores about
seven P.M. and try to buy enough stuff to eat up a ten dollar bill
before the doors close. But that's a minor detail. What makes me love
our Christmas is its communism. Christmas isn't a family rite in
Homeburg. It's a town festival, a cross between Home-coming Week and a
general amnesty celebration.

[Illustration: In Homeburg you come home to the whole town.]

People come home for Christmas all over the world, but in Homeburg you
don't merely come home to your family, you come home to the whole town.
A week before the twenty-fifth the clans begin to gather. Usually the
college folks come first. Sometimes we have as many as a dozen, and the
whole town is on edge to see them. It's next to a circus parade in
interest because you never can tell what new sort of clothes the boys
are going to spring on us. In the grand old days when DeLancey Payley
and Sam Singer used to blow in for Christmas, they walked up from the
depot between double lines of admirers, and their clothes never failed
to strike us with awe. I remember the year when Sam came home with one
of those overcoats with a sort of hood effect in the back. I never
saw one before or since. He was also wearing a felt hat as flat as a
soup plate that year and a two-quart pipe fitted carefully into his
face, and when old Bill Dorgan, the drayman, saw him, he threw up both
hands and cried, "My gosh, it ain't possible!"

Then the children begin coming back. There is a great difference between
Homeburg and New York regarding children. In New York a child is
personal property. But in Homeburg a child belongs to the whole town. A
birth notice is a real news item in Homeburg. I suppose every baby is
personally inspected by at least two hundred citizens. We criticize
their care and feeding, suggest spanking when they are a little older,
quiver unanimously with horror when they begin to "flip" freight trains,
or get scarlet fever, and watch them grow up as eagerly as you New
Yorkers watched the Woolworth Building. When they are graduated from
high school we are all there with bouquets and presents, and we have an
equity in th