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Eppleby’s store was all decorated up with green cut paper and tassels and turkey-red calico poinsettias, and it looked real nice and tasty. And the store was full of the country trade. The little overhead track that took the bundles had broke down just at the wrong minute, and old rich Mis’ Wiswell’s felt soles had got stuck half-way, and Eppleby himself was up on top of a counter trying to rescue ’em for her, while she made tart remarks below. When he’d fished ’em out and wrapped ’em up for her,
“Eppleby,” I says, “would you be willing to shut up shop on Christmas Eve, or wouldn’t you?”
He looked kind of startled. “It’s a pretty good night for trade, you know, Calliope?” says he – doubtful.
“Why, yes,” I says, “it is. But everybody that’s going to give presents to people’ll give presents to people. And if the stores ain’t open Christmas Eve, folks’ll buy ’em when the stores is open. Is that sense, or ain’t it?”
He knew it was. And when I told him what I’d got hold of, stray places in my head, he says if the rest would shut he’d shut, and be glad of it. Abigail Arnold done the same about her home bakery, and the Gekerjecks, and two-three more. But Silas Sykes, that keeps the post-office store, he was firm.
“If that ain’t woman-foolish,” he says, “I donno what is. You ain’t no more idee of business than so many cats. No, sir. I don’t betray the public by cutting ’em off of one evening’s shopping like that.”
It made a nice little sentence to quote, and I quoted it consider’ble. And the result was, the rest of ’em, that knew Silas, head and heart, finally says, all right, he could keep open if he wanted to, and enjoy himself, and they’d all shut up. I honestly think they kind of appreciated, in a nice, neighborly way, making Silas feel mean – when he’d ought to.
It was a little harder to make the Sunday-school superintendents see the thing that I had in my head. Of course, when a thing has been the way it has been for a good while, you can’t really blame people for feeling that it’s been the way it ought to be. Feelings seems made that way. Our superintendent has been our superintendent for ’most forty years – ever since the church was built – and of course his thoughts is kind of turned to bone in some places, naturally.
His name is Jerry Bemus, and he keeps a little harness shop next door to the Town Hall that’s across from Market Square. When I went in that day he was resting from making harnesses, and he was practising on his cornet. He can make a bugle call real nice – you can often hear it, going up and down Daphne Street in the morning, and when I’m down doing my trading I always like to hear it – it gives me kind of a nice, old-fashioned feeling, like when Abigail Arnold fries doughnuts in the back of the Home Bakery and we can all smell ’em, out in the road.
“Jerry,” I says, “how much is our Sunday-school Christmas tree going to cost us?”
Jerry’s got a wooden leg, and he can not remember not to try to cross it over the other one. He done that now, and give it up.
“We calc’late about twenty-five dollars,” says he, proud.
“What we going to do to celebrate?”
“Well,” he says, “have speaking pieces – we got a program of twenty numbers already,” says he, pleased. “And a trimmed tree, and an orange, and a bag of nuts and candy for every child,” he says.
“All the other churches is going to do the same,” I says. “Five trees and five programs and five sets of stuff all around. And all of ’em on Christmas Eve, when you’d think we’d all sort of draw together instead of setting apart, in cliques. Land,” I says out, “that first Christmas Eve wouldn’t the angels have stopped singing and wept in the sky if they could of seen what we’d do to it!”
“Hush, Calliope,” says Jerry Bemus, shocked. “They ain’t no need to be sacrilegious, is they?”
“Not a bit,” says I; “we’ve been it so long a’ready, worshiping around in sections like Hottentots. Well, now,” I says, “do you honestly think we’ve all chose the best way to go at Christmas Eve for the children, filling them up with colored stuff and getting their stummicks all upset?”
We had quite a little talk about it, back and forth, Jerry and me. And all of a sudden, while I was trying my best to make him see what I saw, I happened to notice his bugle again.
“There ain’t no thrill in none of it,” I was saying to him. “Not half so much,” I says, “as there is in your bugle. When I hear that go floating up and down the street, I always kind of feel like it was announcing something. To my notion,” I says, “it could announce Christmas to this town far better than forty-’leven little separate trimmed-up trees… Why, Jerry,” I says out sudden, “listen to what I’ve thought of…”
A little something had come in my head that minute, unexpected, that fitted itself into the rest of my plan. And it made Jerry say, pretty soon, that he was willing to go with me to see the other superintendents; and we done so that very day. Ain’t it funny how big things work out by homely means – by homely means? Sole because the choir-leader in one choir had resigned because the bass in that choir was the bass in that choir, and so they didn’t have anybody there to train their Christmas music, and sole because another congregation was hard up and was having to borrow its Christmas celebration money out of the foreign missionary fund – we got ’em to see sense. And then the other two joined in.
The schools were all right from the first, being built, like they are, on a basis of belonging to everybody, same as breathing and one-two other public utilities, and nothing dividing anybody from anybody. And I begun to feel like life and the world was just one great bud, longing to open, so be it could get enough care.
The worst ones to get weaned away from a perfectly selfish way of observing Christ’s birthday was the private families. Land, land, I kept saying to myself them days, we all of us act like we was studying kindergarten mathematics. We count up them that’s closest to us, and we can’t none of us seem to count much above ten.
Not all of ’em was that way, though. Well – if it just happens that you live in any town whatever in the civilized world, I think you’ll know about what I had said to me.
On the one hand it went about like this, from Mis’ Timothy Toplady and the Holcombs and the Hubbelthwaits and a lot more:
“Well, land knows, it’d save us lots of back-aching work – but – will the children like it?”
“Like it?” I says. “Try ’em. Trust ’em without trying ’em if you want to. I would. Remember,” I couldn’t help adding, “you like to be with the children a whole lot oftener than they like to be with you. What they like is to be together.”
And, “Well, do you honestly think it’ll work? I don’t see how it can – anything so differ’nt.”
And, “Well, they ain’t any harm trying it one year, as I can see. That can’t break up the holidays, as I know of.”
But the other side had figured it out just like the other side of everything always figures.
“Calliope,” says Mis’ Postmaster Sykes, “are you crazy-headed? What’s your idee? Ain’t things all right the way they’ve always been done?”
“Well,” says I, conservative, “not all of ’em. Not wholesale, I wouldn’t say.”
“But you can’t go changing things like this,” she told me. “What’ll become of Christmas?”
“Christmas,” I says, “don’t need you or me, Mis’ Sykes, to be its guardians. All Christmas needs is for us to get out of its way, and leave it express what it means.”
“But the home Christmas,” she says, ’most like a wail. “Would you do away with that?”
Then I sort of turned on her. I couldn’t help it.
“Whose home?” I says stern. “If it’s your home you mean, or any of the thousands of others like it where Christmas is kept, then you know, and they all know, that nothing on earth can take away the Christmas feeling and the Christmas joy as long as you want it to be there. But if it’s the homes you mean – and there’s thousands of ’em – where no Christmas ever comes, you surely ain’t arguing to keep them the way they’ve been kept?”
But she continued to shake her head.
“You can do as you like, of course,” she said, “and so can everybody else. It’s their privilege. But as for me, I shall trim my little tree here by our own fireside. And here we shall celebrate Christmas – Jeddie and Nora and father and me.”
“Why can’t you do both?” I says. “I wouldn’t have you give up your fireside end of things for anything on earth. But why can’t you do both?”
Mis’ Sykes didn’t rightly seem to know – at least she didn’t say. But she give me to understand that her mind run right along in the self-same groove it had had made for it, cozy.
Somehow, the longer I live, the less sense I seem to have. There’s some things I’ve learned from twenty-five to thirty times in my life, and yet I can’t seem to remember them no more than I can remember whether it’s sulphite or sulphate of soda that I take for my quinsy. And one of these is about taking things casual.
That night, for instance, when I come round the corner on to Daphne Street at half-past seven on Christmas Eve, I thought I was going to have to waste a minute or two standing just where the bill-board makes a shadow for the arc-light, trying to get used to the idea of what we were doing – used to it in my throat. But there wasn’t much time to spend that way, being there were things to do between then and eight o’clock, when we’d told ’em all to be there. So I ran along and tried not to think about it – except the work part. ’Most always, the work part of anything’ll steady you.
The great cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree, standing down there on the edge of the Market Square and acting as if it had been left from some long-ago forest, on purpose, had been hung round with lines and lines of strung pop-corn – the kind that no Christmas tree would be a Christmas tree without, because so many, many folks has set up stringing it nights of Christmas week, after the children was in bed, and has kept it, careful, in a box, so’s it’d do for next year. We had all that from the churches – Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopal and Baptist and Catholic pop-corn, and you couldn’t tell ’em apart at all when you got ’em on the tree. The festoons showed ghostly-white in the dark and the folks showed ghostly-black, hurrying back and forth doing the last things.
And the folks was coming – you could hear ’em all along Daphne Street, tripping on the bad place that hadn’t been mended because it was right under the arc-light, and coming over the hollow-sounding place by Graham’s drug-store, and coming from the little side streets and the dark back streets and the streets down on the flats. Some of ’em had Christmas trees waiting at home – the load had been there on the Market Square, just like we had let it be there for years without seeing that the Market Square had any other Christmas uses – and a good many had bought trees. But a good many more had decided not to have any – only just to hang up stockings; and to let the great big common Christmas tree stand for what it stood for, gathering most of that little garland of Daphne Street trees up into its living heart.
Over by the bandstand I come on them I’d been looking for – Eddie Newhaven and Arthur Mills and Lily Dorron and Sarah and Mollie and the Cartwrights and Lifty and six-eight more.
“Hello, folks,” I says. “What you down here for? Why ain’t you home?”
They answered all together:
“For the big tree!”
“Are you, now?” I says – just to keep on a-talking to ’em. “Whose tree?”
I love to remember the way they answered. It was Eddie Newhaven that said it.
“Why, all of us’s!” he said.
All of us’s! I like to say it over when they get to saying “mine” and “theirs” too hard where I am.
When it was eight o’clock and there was enough gathered on the Square, they done the thing that was going to be done, only nobody had known how well they were going to do it. They touched the button, and from the bottom branch to the tip-top little cone, the big old tree came alight, just like it knew what it was all about and like it had come out of the ground long ago for this reason – only we’d never known. Two hundred little electric lights there were, colored, and paid for private, though I done my best to get the town to pay for ’em, like it ought to for its own tree; but they was paid for private – yet.
It made a little oh! come in the crowd and run round, it was so big and beautiful, standing there against the stars like it knew well enough that it was one of ’em, whether we knew it or not. And coming up across the flats, big and gold and low, was the moon, most full, like it belonged, too.
“And glory shone around,” I says to myself – and I stood there feeling the glory, outside and in. Not my little celebration, and your little celebration, and their little celebration, private, that was costing each of us more than it ought to – but our celebration, paying attention to the message that Christ paid attention to.
I was so full of it that I didn’t half see Ben Cory and his carolers come racing out of the dark. They was all fixed up in funny pointed hoods and in cloaks and carrying long staves with everybody’s barn-yard lanterns tied on the end of ’em, and they run out in a line down to the tree, and they took hold of hands and danced around it, singing to their voices’ top a funny old tune, one of them tunes that, whether you’ve ever heard it before or not, kind of makes things in you that’s older than you are yourself wake up and remember, real plain.
And Jerry Bemus shouted out at ’em: “Sing it again – sing it again!” and pounded his wooden leg with his cane. “Sing it again, I tell you. I ain’t heard anybody sing that for goin’ on forty years.” And everybody laughed, and they sung it again for him, and some more songs that had come out of the old country that a little bit of it was living inside everybody that was there. And while they were singing, it came to me all of a sudden about another night, ’most three hundred years before, when on American soil that lonesome English heart, up there in Boston, had dreamed ahead to a time when Christmas would come here…
“But faith unrolls the future scrolls;
Christmas shall not die,
Nor men of English blood and speech
Forget their ancestry – ”
or any other blood, or any other speech that has in it the spirit of what Christ come to teach. And that’s all of us. And it felt to me as if now we were only just beginning to take out our little single, lonely tapers and carry them to light a great tree.
Then, just after the carols died down, the thing happened that we’d planned to happen: Over on one side the choirs of all the churches, that I guess had never sung together in their lives before, though they’d been singing steadily about the self-same things since they was born choirs, begun to sing —
Silent night, holy night.
Think of it – down there on the Market Square that had never had anything sung on it before except carnival tunes and circus tunes. All up and down Daphne Street it must of sounded, only there was hardly anybody far off to hear it, the most of ’em being right there with all of us. They sung it without anybody playing it for ’em and they sung it from first to last.
And then they slipped into another song that isn’t a Christmas carol exactly, nor not any song that comes in the book under “Christmas,” but something that comes in just as natural as if it was another name for what Christmas was – “Nearer, my God, to thee,” and “Lead, Kindly Light,” and some more. And after a bar or two of the first one, the voices all around begun kind of mumbling and humming and carrying the tunes along in their throats without anybody in particular starting ’em there, and then they all just naturally burst out and sung too.
And so I donno who done it – whether the choirs had planned it that way, or whether they just thought of it then, or whether somebody in the crowd struck it up unbeknownst to himself, or whether the song begun to sing itself; but it come from somewhere, strong and clear and real – a song that the children has been learning in school and has been teaching the town for a year or two now, sung to the tune of “Wacht am Rhein”:
The crest and crowning of all good —
Life’s common goal – is brotherhood.
And then everybody sung. Because that’s a piece you can’t sing alone. You can not sing it alone. All over the Market Square they took it up, and folks that couldn’t sing, and me that can’t sing a note except when there’s nobody around that would recognize me if they ever saw me again – we all sung together, there in the dark, with the tree in the midst.
And we seemed long and long away from the time when the leader in one of them singing choirs had left the other choir because the bass in the other choir was the bass in the other choir. And it was like the Way Things Are had suddenly spoke for a minute, there in the singing choirs come out of their separate lofts, and in all the singing folks. And in all of us – all of us.
Then up hopped Eppleby Holcomb on to a box in front of the tree, and he calls out:
“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas – on the first annual outdoor Christmas-tree celebration of Friendship Village!”
When he said that I felt – well, it don’t make any difference to anybody how I felt; but what I done was to turn and make for the edge of the crowd just as fast as I could. And just then there come what Eppleby’s words was the signal for. And out on the little flagstaff balcony of the Town Hall Jerry Bemus stepped with his bugle, and he blew it shrill and clear, so that it sounded all over the town, once, twice, three times, a bugle-call to say it was Christmas. We couldn’t wait till twelve o’clock – we are all in bed long before that time in Friendship Village, holiday or not.
But the bugle-call said it was Christmas just the same. Think of it … the bugle that used to say it was war. And the same minute the big tree went out, all still and quiet, but to be lit again next year and to stay a living thing in between.
When I stepped on to Daphne Street, who should I come face to face with but Mis’ Postmaster Sykes. I was feeling so glorified over, that I never thought of its being strange that she was there. But she spoke up, just the same as if I’d said: “Why, I thought you wasn’t coming near.”
“The children was bound to come,” she says, “so I had to bring ’em.”
“Yes,” I thought to myself, “the children know. They know.”
And I even couldn’t feel bad when I passed the post-office store and see Silas sitting in there all sole alone – the only lit store in the street. I knew he’d be on the Market Square the next year.
They went singing through all the streets that night, Ben Cory and his carolers. “Silent night, holy night” come from my front gate when I was ’most asleep. It was like the whole town was being sung to by something that didn’t show. And when the time comes that this something speaks clear all the time, – well, it ain’t a very far-off time, you know.
EXIT CHARITY
“Yes, sir,” said Silas Sykes, “we got to get some charity goin’ in this town.”
“Charity,” I says over, meditative. “How do you mean, Silas?”
“How do I mean?” says Silas, snappy. “Don’t you know your Bible, woman?”
“I ain’t so sure I do as I use’ to be,” I told him. “I use’ to think charity was givin’ things away. Then I had a spell I use’ to think it was coverin’ up their faults. Now I dunno as I’m clear what it is.”
Silas bridled some and snorted soft.
“Charity,” says he, “charity, Calliope Marsh, is doin’ nice things for folks.”
“Doin’ nice things for folks,” I says over – and I wanted to remember them words of Silas and I longed to feed ’em to him some time. But I just took up my pound of prunes and went out the post-office store, thoughtful.
Outside on the walk, I come on Absalom. He stood kicking his heels on the hydrant and looking up and down the street like he was waiting, for something that there wasn’t any such thing, and he knew it. Absalom Ricker he was, that has work in the canning factory, when any. I’d been wantin’ to see him.
“Evenin’, Ab,” says I. “How’s Gertie?”
“She ain’t on her feet yet,” says he, rueful.
“How’s your mother’s rheumatism?”
“It ain’t in her fingers yet,” says he, bright.
“How’re you?”
“Oh, me!” he says. “I’m rosy.”
“Your arm,” says I; “will it let you go to work yet?”
“Not yet,” he says, “the thermometer actin’ up zero, so. But still, I’m rosy – rosy.”
“Well,” says I, “bein’ you’re more rosy than busy, I wonder if you couldn’t do something for us ladies. You know,” I says, “that nice, new, galvanized iron garbage tank us ladies bought and run one season, collectin’ up garbage? Well, I dunno but what we’ve got to sell it, the Council refusin’ to run it, ’count of economy. And I wondered if you’d go and hev a look at it, and tell us what we’d ought to get for it, and where.”
“Why, sure I will,” says Absalom. “I’d be glad,” says he, kind of pleasant and important, “to accommodate.”
He went off down the street, walking sidewise, like he does, his coat and beard blowing out the same side, his pockets sagging till they looked like mouths smiling, and his hat trained up to a peak. Everybody liked Absalom – he had such a nice, one-sided smile and he seemed to be so afraid he was going to hurt your feelings. He’d broke his right arm in Silas’s canning factory that fall, and he’d been laying off ever since. His wife done washings, and his mother finished vests from the city, and the children stuffed up cracks in the walls and thought it was a game.
They was others in the town, come lately, and mostly in the factory, that was the same way: the Bettses and the Doles and the Haskitts and the Hennings. They lived in little shacks around, and the men worked in the canning factory and the gas-works and on the tracks, and the women helped out. And one or two of ’em had took down ill; and so it was Silas, that likes to think of things first, that up and said “do something.” And it was him put the notice in the papers a few nights later to all citizens – and women – that’s interested in forming a Charity Society to meet in Post-Office Hall, that he has the renting of.
I was turning in the stairway to the hall that night when I heard somebody singing. And coming down the walk, with her hat on crooked and its feather broke, was old Bess Bones. Bess has lived in Friendship Village for years – and I always thought it was real good for the town that she done so. For she is the only woman I ever knew of that ain’t respectable, and ain’t rich or famous either, and yet that goes to everybody’s house.
