deal of suspense out of some of your baseball games
here, especially when Chicago plays you, but the most suspense per
individual I've ever noticed has been in these Christmas Eve exercises
when some youngster just high enough to step over a crack in the floor
gets up to recite a piece, and fourteen parents and relatives lean
forward and forget to breathe until he has gotten his forty words out,
wrong end to, and has been snatched off the stage by his relieved
mother.

Competition gets into everything, and it has marred our Christmas
exercises a little lately. The Methodists are growing fast and are very
ambitious. A few years ago they rented the Opera House, put in two
Christmas trees, with a real fireplace between and a Santa Claus who
came out of it, and charged ten cents admission. That embittered us
Congregationalists. It smacked of commercialism to us, and we would not
budge an inch--besides, there wasn't another Opera House to rent. So,
nowadays, our spirit of good-fellowship on Christmas Eve is sort of
absent-minded and anxious. We are always counting up our attendance and
sizing up our tree, and then sliding over to the Opera House and looking
over the Methodist layout. Sometimes we beat them, but generally they
have a regular mass meeting and make a barrel of money. Last year they
turned people away and brought Santa Claus on the stage in a real
automobile. We were so jealous that we could hardly cool down in time
for Christmas dinner.

As a matter of fact, the only unimportant part of our Christmas season
is Christmas Day itself. It is a sort of hiatus in the great doings.
When we go home on Christmas Eve, it is with a great peace. We have
bought our presents. We have greeted all the returned prodigals. We have
made up with a few carefully selected enemies. Our children have spoken
their pieces successfully at the Exercises, and have gotten a good start
on the job of eating their way through a young mountain range of mixed
candies and nuts. All the hustle and worry is over, and we are
unanimously happy. The week following Christmas will be one dizzy round
of parties and teas for the visitors, and Homeburg will be a delightful
place full of the friends of boyhood, with an average of one reunion
every fifteen minutes in and out of business hours. But on Christmas Day
nothing will happen except the dinner. We'll get our presents in the
morning, and then at noon the great crisis will come. We'll either
conquer