ouldn't. That kind of got me out of the idea, and
then I see all the nonsense of it."

"The _nonsense_?" Jenny repeated.

"If you don't like folks, you don't want to give nothing to them or take
nothing from them. And if you do like 'em you don't want to have to wait
to Christmas to give 'em things. Ain't that so?" Mary Chavah put it.

"_No_," said Jenny; "it ain't. Not a bit so." And when Mary laughed,
questioned her, pressed her, "It seems perfectly awful to me not to have
a Christmas," Jenny could say only, "I feel like the Winter didn't have
no backbone to it."

"It's a dead time, Winter," Mary assented. "What's the use of tricking
it up with gewgaws and pretending it's a live time? Besides, if you
ain't got the money, you ain't got the money. And nobody has, this year.
Unless they go ahead and buy things anyway, like the City."

Jenny shook her head. "I got seven Christmas-present relatives and ten
Christmas-present friends, and I've only spent Two Dollars and Eighty
cents on 'em all," she said, "for material. But I've made little things
for every one of 'em. It don't seem as if that much had ought to hurt
any one."

Jenny looked past her out the window, somewhere beyond the snow.

"They's something else," she added, "it ain't all present giving...."

"Nonsense," said Mary Chavah, "take the present trading away from
Christmas and see how long it'd last. I was in the City once for
Christmas. I'll never forget it--never. I never see folks work like the
folks worked there. The streets was Bedlam. The stores was worse.
'What'll I get him?...' 'I've just got to get something for her....' 'It
don't seem as if this is nice enough after what she give me last
year....' I can hear 'em yet. They spent money wicked. And I said to
myself that I was glad from my head to my feet that I was done with
Christmas. And I been preaching it ever since. And I'm pleased this town
has had to come to it."

"It ain't the way I feel," said Jenny. She got up and wandered to the
window and hardly heard while Mary went on with more of the sort. "It
seems kind of like going back on the ways things are," Jenny said, as
she turned. Then, as she made ready to go, she broke off and smote her
hands together.

"Oh," she said, "it don't seem as if I could bear it not to have
Christmas--not _this_ year."

"You mean your and Bruce's first Christmas," said Mary. "Mark my words,
he'll be glad to be rid of the fuss. Men always are. Come on out t