of a day from which one had been led
to expect larger ecstasies than a surfeit of dishes and the explosion
of crackers can give. One might have enjoyed it well enough, perhaps,
if one had not had the feeling that it was one's duty to be happy. But
to be deliberately happy for a whole day was a task as exhausting as
deliberately hopping with one's feet tied. It was not that one wanted
to be unhappy. It was merely that one desired one's liberty to be
either as happy or as miserable as one pleased.

Remembering these early hostilities, I will not bid anyone be happy or
merry or jolly on Christmas Day, except as the turkey and plum-pudding
move them. At the same time, I cannot let the festival pass without
recanting my childish insolence towards the holly and the mistletoe. I
have been converted to Christmas as thoroughly almost as that prince
of individualists, Scrooge. I can now pull a cracker with any man; I
can accept gifts without actual discourtesy; and if the flame goes out
before the plum-pudding reaches me, I am as mortified as can be. The
Christmas tree shines with the host of the stars, and I can even
forgive my neighbour who plays "While shepherds watched" all day long
on the gramophone. The Salvation Army, which plays the same tune and
one or two others all through the small hours on the trombone and the
cornet-a-piston, is a severer test of endurance. But even that one can
grin and bear when one remembers that the Salvationist bandsmen are
but a sort of melancholy herald angels. The solitary figure in the
Christmas procession, indeed, whom one hates with a boiling and
bubbling hatred, is the postman who does not call. In Utopia the
postman does not miss a letter-box on Christmas Day. Or on any other
day.

It would be affectation to pretend, however, that one has suddenly
developed a craving for plum-pudding and cracker-mottoes in one's
middle age. One's reconcilement with Christmas is due neither to one's
stomach nor to a taste for the wit and wisdom of cracker
manufacturers. It is simply that one has come to enjoy a season of
lordly inutility, when for the space of a day or two the cash-nexus
hangs upon the world as light as air. It is no small thing to have
this upsetting of the tyrannies, if it is only for a few hours. The
heathen, as we call them, realised this even before the birth of
Christ, and had the Saturnalia and other festivals of the kind in
which a communism of licence ruled, if not a communis