morn.
And when all the parcels were definitely unpacked, and the secrets of
all hearts disclosed, we spent the rest of the happy morn in waiting,
candidly greedy, for the first of the great meals. And then we ate, and
we drank, and we ate again; with no thought of nutrition, nor of
reasonableness, nor of the morrow, nor of dyspepsia. We ate and drank
without fear and without shame, in the sheer, abandoned ecstasy of
celebration. And by means of motley paper headgear, fit only for a
carnival, we disguised ourselves in the most absurd fashions, and yet
did not make ourselves seriously ridiculous; for ridicule is in the
vision, not in what is seen. And we danced and sang and larked, until we
could no more. And finally we chanted a song of ceremony, and separated;
ending the day as we had commenced it, with salvoes of good wishes. And
the next morning we were indisposed and enfeebled; and we did not care;
we suffered gladly; we had our pain's worth, and more. This was the
past.

* * * * *

Even today the spirit and rites of ancient Christmas are kept up, more
or less in their full rigour and splendour, by a race of beings that is
scattered over the whole earth. This race, mysterious, masterful,
conservative, imaginative, passionately sincere, arriving from we know
not where, dissolving before our eyes we know not how, has its way in
spite of us. I mean the children. By virtue of the children's faith, the
reindeer are still tramping the sky, and Christmas Day is still
something above and beyond a day of the week; it is a day out of the
week. We have to sit and pretend; and with disillusion in our souls we
do pretend. At Christmas, it is not the children who make-believe; it
is ourselves. Who does not remember the first inkling of a suspicion
that Christmas Day was after all a day rather like any other day? In the
house of my memories, it was the immemorial duty of my brother on
Christmas morning, before anything else whatever happened, to sit down
to the organ and perform "Christians Awake" with all possible stops
drawn. He had to do it. Tradition, and the will that emanated from the
best bedroom, combined to force him to do it. One Christmas morning, as
he was preparing the stops, he glanced aside at me with a supercilious
curl of the lips, and the curl of my lips silently answered. It was as
if he had said: "I condescend to this," and as if I had said: "So do I."

Such a moment comes to mo