ders have got to scratch gravel to get together
any Christmas at all, if any. And speaking for us merchants, I may say,
we'll lay in the stock if folks'll buy it. But if they can't afford to
pay for it, we don't want the stock personally."

"I guess we've all had the experience," observed Mis' Jane Moran, "of
announcing we wasn't going to give any gifts _this_ year, and then had
somebody send something embroidered by hand, with a solid month's work
on it. But if we all agree to secede from Christmas, we can lay down the
law to folks so's it'll be understood: _No Christmas for nobody_."

"Not to children?" said Mis' Abby Winslow, doubtfully.

"My idea is to teach 'em to do entirely without Christmas," harped Mis'
Bates. "We can't afford one. Why not let the children share in the
family privation without trying to fool 'em with make-shift presents and
boiled sugar?"

Over in a corner near the window plants, whose dead leaves she had been
picking off, sat Ellen Bourne--Mis' Matthew Bourne she was, but nearly
everybody called her Ellen Bourne. There is some law about these things:
why instinctively we call some folk by the whole name, some by their
first names, some by the last, some by shortening the name, some by a
name not their own. Perhaps there is a name for each of us, if only we
knew where to look, and folk intuitively select the one most like that.
Perhaps some of us, by the sort of miracle that is growing every day,
got the name that is meant for us. Perhaps some of us struggle along
with consonants that spell somebody else. And how did some names get
themselves so terrifically overused unless by some strange might, say, a
kind of astrological irregularity.... Ellen Bourne sat by the window and
suddenly looked over her shoulder at the room.

"If we've got the things made," she said, "can't we give 'em? If it's to
children?"

"I think if we're going to omit, we'd ought to omit," Mis Bates held her
own; "it can't matter to you, Ellen, with no children, so...." She
caught herself sharply up. Ellen's little boy had died a Christmas or
two ago.

"No," Ellen said, "I ain't any children, of course. But--"

"Well, I think," said Mis' Jane Moran, "that we've hit on the only way
we could have hit on to chirk each other up over a hard time."

"And get off delicate ourselves same time," said Buff Miles. From the
first Buff had been advocating what he called "an open Christmas," and
there were those near him at the m