On Christmas That Is Coming

THESE lines first appeared some time in Christmas week; thereby violating all the fundamental principles of modern civilization, defying the normal and necessary laws of Christmas Trade, Christinas Sales, Christmas Numbers, Christmas Shopping, and even a great deal of Christmas greeting; in a word, committing the crime of talking about Christmas quite near to Christmas Day. For the curious custom of our time has turned Christmas into a vast anticipation; by turning it into a vast advertisement. Most journalists have to write their Christmas articles somewhere about the last days of their summer holiday; and prepare to launch them at the earliest about the middle of the autumn. They have to stuff their imaginations with holly and mistletoe while gazing at the last rose of summer; or call up a vision of falling snowflakes in a forest of falling leaves, It is a rather peculiar feature of modern times; and is connected with other things that are typically modem* It is perhaps mixed up with that spirit of Prophecy, which has made the modern Utopias; and has even led some men to call themselves Futurists, on the quaint supposition that it is possible to be really fond o£ the future. It is connected with that optimism once romantically expressed in the phrase "a good time coming"; which its simpler supporters might perhaps convey in the formula of "now we shan't be long"; which its more sardonic critics might perhaps express in the formula, "jam tomorrow; but never jam today." At least, in the matter of the serious prediction of social perfection, it is hardly unfair to say that many would still agree that there is a good time coming; but would find it difficult to agree that now, at this particular moment, we shan't be long. They would still say that Utopia is coming, as some men say that Christmas is coming; especially when they say it (with a shade of bitterness) about the month of March or April. But, under all the official publicity, it is comparatively rare to say that Christmas is coming, at the very moment when it really is coming. It is perhaps even rarer to say, with a solid and complete satisfaction, that Christmas has come.

For the Futurist fashion of our time has led nearly everybody to look for happiness tomorrow rather than today. Thus, while there is an incessant and perhaps even increasing fuss about the approach of the festivities of Christmas, there is rather less fuss than there ought to be about really making Christmas festive. Modern men have a vague feeling that when they have conic to the feast, they have come to the finish. By modern commercial customs, the preparations for it have been so very long and the practice of it seems 50 very short. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the older traditional customs, in the days when it was a sacred festival for a simpler people. Then the preparation took the form of the more austere season of Advent and the fast of Christmas Eve. But when men passed on to the feast of Christmas, it went on for a long time after die feast of Christmas Day. It always went on for a continuous holiday of rejoicing for at least twelve days; and only ended in that wild culmination which Shakespeare described as Twelfth Night or What You Will. That is to say, it was a sort of Saturnalia which ended in anybody doing whatever he would; ami in William Shakespeare writing some very beautiful and rather irrelevant poetry, round a perfectly impossible story about a brother and sister who looked exactly alike. In our more enlightened times, the perfectly impossible stories are printed in magazines a month or two before Christmas has begun at all; and in the hustle and hurry of this early publication, the beautiful poetry is somehow or other left out.

It were vain to conceal my own reactionary prejudice; which deludes me into thinking there is something to be said for the older manner. I am so daring as darkly to suspect that it would be better if people could enjoy Christmas when it came, instead of being bored with the news that it was coming. I even think it might be better to be the naughty little boy who falls sick through eating too much Christmas pudding, than to be the more negative and nihilistic little boy, who is sick of seeing pictures of Christmas pudding, in popular periodicals or coloured hoardings, for months before he gets any pudding at all.

At any rate, the proof of the Christmas pudding is in the eating. And it stands as a symbol of a whole series of things; which too many people nowadays have forgotten how to enjoy in themselves, and for themselves, and at the time when they are actually consumed. Far too much space is taken up with the names of things rather than the things themselves; with designs and plans and pictorial announcements of certain objects; rather than with the real objects when they are really objective. The world we know is far too full of rumours and reports and reflected reputations; instead of the direct appreciation by appetite and actual experience. The difficulty always presented to those who would restore men to a simpler life on the land, for instance, is always some form of the objection (true or false) that modern men would be dull if they dealt with real land on a farm, instead o£ unreal landscape in a film. As a fact, the farm landscape has a hundred interesting things in it which the film landscape has not. But the critics cannot bring themselves to believe that a man will ever again have a taste for going back to the originals, as more interesting than the copies. For all the apparent materialism and mass mechanism of our present culture, we far more than any of our fathers live in a world of shadows. It is none the less so because the prophets and progressives tell us eagerly that these are coming events which cast their shadow before. It is assumed that nothing is really thrilling except a dance of shadows; and we miss the very meaning of substance.

There is another way in which the Christmas pudding, though substantial enough, is itself an allegory and a sign. The little boy expects to find sixpences in the pudding; and this is right enough, so long as the sixpences are secondary to the pudding. Now the change from the medieval to the modern world might be very truly described under that image. It is all the difference between putting sixpences in a Christmas pudding and erecting a Christmas pudding round sixpences. There was money in the old days of Christmas and Christendom; there was merchandise; there were merchants. But the moral scheme of all the old order.

|r ON CHRISTMAS THAT IS COMING whatever its other vices and diseases, always assumed that money was secondary to substance; that the merchant was secondary to the maker. Windfalls of money came to this man and that, as shillings and sixpences are extracted excitedly from Christmas puddings. But the idea o£ normal owning or enjoying preponderated over the idea of accidental or adventurous gain. With the rise of the merchant adventurers the whole world gradually changed, until the preponderance was all the other way. The world was dominated by what the late Lord Birkenhead described as "the glittering prizes," without which, as he appeared to believe, men could not be really moved to any healthy or humane activity. And it is true that men came to think too much about prizes, and too little about pudding. This, in connexion with ordinary pudding, is a fallacy; in connexion with Christmas pudding it is a blasphemy. For there is truly something of perversity, not unmixed with profanity, about the notion of trade completely transforming a tradition of such sacred origin. Millions of perfectly healthy and worthy men and women still "keep Christmas, and do in all sincerity keep it holy as well as happy. But there are some, profiting by such 'natural schemes of play and pleasure-seeking, who have used it for things far baser than either pleasure-seeking or play. They have betrayed Christmas. For them the substance of Christmas, like the substance of Christmas pudding, has become stale stuff in which their own treasure is buried; and they have only multiplied the sixpences into thirty pieces of silver.