Christmas Cards

By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock
of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and
10's were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to
rub them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers
design us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to
the time we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of
meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they
were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so
inadequate to the festival.

This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance
and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists have
nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide convention.
After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we have found
not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of the true
romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies around
us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs in
snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what has a
blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug of
mulled claret. Now these things are merry enough in their way, or they
were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in
Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and
circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled
in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?
Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket
of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and
holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? Root beer may be but meager
flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate 'tis honest, 'tis
actual, 'tis tangible and potable. And where, among all the Christmas
cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing of all our
triumphs? Where is the stately apartment house, looming like Gibraltar
against a sunset sky? Must we, even at Christmas time, fool ourselves
with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is around
us?

It is said that man's material achievements have outrun his imagination;
that poets and painters are too puny to grapple with the world as it
is. Certainly a visitor from another sphere, looking on our fantastic
and exciting civilization, would find little reflection of it in the
Christmas card. He would find us clinging desperately to what we have
been taught to believe was picturesque and jolly, and afraid to assert
that the things of to-day are comely too. Even on the basis of
discomfort (an acknowledged criterion of picturesqueness) surely a
trolley car jammed with parcel-laden passengers is just as satisfying a
spectacle as any stage coach? Surely the steam radiator, if not so
lovely as a flame-gilded hearth, is more real to most of us? And instead
of the customary picture of shivering subjects of George III held up by
a highwayman on Hampstead Heath, why not a deftly delineated sketch of
victims in a steam-heated lobby submitting to the plunder of the
hat-check bandit? Come, let us be honest! The romance of to-day is as
good as any!

Many must have felt this same uneasiness in trying to find Christmas
cards that would really say something of what is in their hearts. The
sentiment behind the card is as lovely and as true as ever, but the
cards themselves are outmoded bottles for the new wine. It seems a cruel
thing to say, but we are impatient with the mottoes and pictures we see
in the shops because they are a conventional echo of a beauty that is
past. What could be more absurd than to send to a friend in a city
apartment a rhyme such as this:

As round the Christmas fire you sit
And hear the bells with frosty chime,
Think, friendship that long love has knit
Grows sweeter still at Christmas time!

If that is sent to the janitor or the elevator boy we have no cavil, for
these gentlemen do actually see a fire and hear bells ring; but the
apartment tenant hears naught but the hissing of the steam in the
radiator, and counts himself lucky to hear that. Why not be honest and
say to him:

I hope the janitor has shipped
You steam, to keep the cold away;
And if the hallboys have been tipped,
Then joy be thine on Christmas Day!

We had not meant to introduce this jocular note into our meditation, for
we are honestly aggrieved that so many of the Christmas cards hark back
to an old tradition that is gone, and never attempt to express any of
the romance of to-day. You may protest that Christmas is the oldest
thing in the world, which is true; yet it is also new every year, and
never newer than now.

Christmas Cards

Attention Bookworms: