By CHARLES M. GUTHRIEof the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
December 23, 1954
MY ONLY quarrel with Christmas is that we're crowding a mite too much into it. The significance of the season gets mired in fun and frivolity and fruitcake--and the frustration which comes with trying to do too much in too little time. The enchantment becomes lost in the welter of entertainment.
All the comings and goings and social shindigs add up to wear and tear on the body, too. Already I feel about as dead as I ever expect to get and it's still the shank of the evening as far as holiday activity is concerned. And I am not the gay type. I am quite a home body, in fact, a comparative square in the social circle.
My suggestion would be that the season start earlier, say about mid-October. We could take it more leisurely then and wouldn't have to ram the holiday caper into a couple of weeks.
THE OLDER I get the more frenzied the pace becomes. The greeting card chore, which I once took in stride, now turns me as green as holly.
Anyway, add to this all the fancy cooking the season demands, the school and church programs and getting the tree up and the lights strung over the doorway and going out or having relatives, friends and associates in for dinner and soon you begin to creak.
Things are about as well in hand at our place as they ever are at this stage, which adds up to mild chaos. The Christmas tree has finally been subdued and bedecked, after once crashing to the floor with carnage to colored balls, lights and piano. Every year we are going to get a "small" tree that we can handle and every year we don't. The one now crowding the parlor would accommodate an eagle's nest.
With the tree crisis resolved, we are trying to skewer in some time to have a few folks in to whom we are socially indebted. I can see no time, save perhaps for a hurried breakfast, and have suggested that the debt ride until February, which would give us a month to rest up. But my wife says it's easier to entertain when evergreens are strewn around to detract the eye from the ink stains on the walls and worn spots in the carpet.
I WAS talking to a neighbor the other day who already had been worn to a nub by the Yuletide pace. He was driving a couple of friends home to pre-Christmas dinner, he said, when his holiday spirits were buoyed by a blowout on Portland avenue. The car slipped off the jack after he had removed the affected wheel, he reported, and by the time a nearby filling-station attendant had provided succor, one precious hour of a tight social schedule had been consumed and he was fit to eat a reindeer raw.
After dinner the revelers had an appointment in a suburb to the north for fruitcake and a gift exchange and it was past midnight before our hero had his guests deposited on their doorstep and he and his wife were back home.
There they were met by the array of dinner dishes on table and sink, which "simply had to be done" (over hubby's stern objections) before bedtime. His wife said she had to devote the morning to getting out the rest of the cards, had a bridge club party in the afternoon, and had to devote a few minutes to planning Junior's birthday party, which unfortunately fell the day after.
So they did the dishes, my neighbor reported, and sang no carols while they worked. Instead, he said, they snapped at each other like wolves around a fallen moose.
THIS sort of thing is somehow out of spirit with the season and you can attribute it more to the crowded schedule than to man's frailty. You can attribute it, too, to the fact that people don't come equipped with cast-iron innards. After a dozen or so round of cookies, shortbreads, candy, nuts and other goodies (and for some the added burden of lutefisk), the digestive tract tends to clog and the Christmas ecstasy to sag, especially if you get caught, like me, with a jumpy tooth.
But don't get the idea that I'm hostile to Christmas. I am for it right down to the finish. By the time I figure out what my wife wants for Christmas, and buy it, my joy will be unconfined.
Copyright 2019 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
