superior advantages of the Christmas season for
anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, of the Arctic
explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian exile;
there is no time so good for the use of this material; and ghosts on
shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own logging
camps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, after
quarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and is
moved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in the
mining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardened
reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, and
breathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the
little brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him from
heaven; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes on
the butts of their revolvers.

It has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective; and here,
already, we have a touch in the Americanized Christmas story of the
moralistic quality of the American Thanksgiving story. This was seldom
written, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader; it was meant
to entertain him, of course; but it was meant to edify him, too, and to
improve him; and some such intention is still present in it. I rather
think that it deals more probably with character to this end than its
English cousin, the Christmas story, does. It is not so improbable that
a man should leave off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that he
should leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; that he should conquer
his appetite as that he should instantly change his nature, by good
resolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutions
in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other.

Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama and
simpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rarely has it dealt
with the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or the
intervention of angels. The weather being so much milder at the close of
November than it is a month later, very little can be done with the
elements; though on the coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be,
very usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more restricted in its
range; the scene is still mostly in New England, and the characters are
of New England extraction, who come home from the West usually, or New
York, for th