Tag: Christmas Page 2 of 3

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 24, 1938.

All God’s children have wings… Christmas is like a pair of glasses that allows us to see them

“I’m heading for the market,” said Jimmie Frise. “Want to come?”

“What’s doing at the market?” I inquired.

“I’ve got to buy a turkey,” said Jim, “the best turkey in the market.”

“A turkey?” I exclaimed. “Then what was that enormous nude figure I saw hanging up in your back kitchen this morning?”

“Ah, that’s our turkey,” explained Jim. “But this one I’ve got to buy is for an old friend of the family, an old lady I’ve been giving a Christmas turkey to now for nearly 20 years.”

“That’s kind,” I submitted. “The true Christmas spirit. We should always remember the poor old ladies.”

“Poor old lady my foot,” laughed Jim. “This one is no poor old lady. She’s got a lot more dough than you and me together. She’s a very comfortable old party, very comfortable indeed.”

“Aha,” I laughed back, “Rich old lady gets Christmas turkey, Jimmie Frise gets ten thousand dollars.”

“No chance,” said Jim. “She gets the income from an estate and every cent of it goes to her children when she dies. But she’s such a lonely old soul, we just started this turkey business after the war and now she expects it, as regular as her cheque from the trust company. She wouldn’t buy a turkey if we didn’t send her one.”

“What kind of a person is she?” I protested. “Some kind of old crank?”

“Oh, no, she’s all right,” explained Jim, “but she just doesn’t get on with people. Her children and so forth. But it doesn’t hurt us to send her a turkey and she gets a tremendous kick out of it. It gives her the Christmas feeling, I guess.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “the people who think they are entitled to feel the Christmas spirit.”

“I always get her,” said Jim, “the finest and biggest turkey I can find. It gives me a queer feeling to send her such a turkey. She can’t ever use it. A little turkey, even a little chicken, would be enough for her. But being reasonable at Christmas seems sort of blasphemous to me. To really feel Christian, you ought to overdo things. You ought to carry things to excess. It’s a form of humor. The divine humor that sent hosts of angels to sing and shout the good tidings of great joy, not, up the main streets and into the better-class residential districts, but to shepherds minding their flocks by night, out on the cold and lonely hills. How about it? Would you like to come?”

So we went to the market, and a great place it is, Christmas week. So crowded with provender, there is hardly any room for the buyers. And it has a great country smell to it, and the cold is so sharp and the sense of bounty so lavish. It is not like going into a store, where the turkeys are in one section and the cabbages in another. You can see all kinds of separate and distinct exhibitions of turkeys, as though it were an art show, and each man had his own chef d’oeuvres by themselves. You struggle slowly through the narrow crowded aisles, gazing upon great displays of hung turkeys, some pallid, some rosy, some bloated, some lean, some neatly killed and some killed as though by a sledge hammer on the head. And all of them aloft above an earthly array of every conceivable vegetable and fruit, offered in country simplicity without guile or art.

Red Ribbon and Gold String

“Don’t let’s be in a hurry,” said Jim. “I want to buy my turkey, knowing it is the biggest and best in the market. That is a most important part of this gift.”

“I can’t understand you going to such bother over a cranky old lady,” I submitted. “It is cold and it’s damp in here. Let’s get going. There’s a dandy big bird, right there.”

“Too old,” said Jim. “Tough as shoe leather. Dry as punk.”

He thrust his way down the aisle and I followed in the wake he made amidst the crowd. He stopped and studied every turkey display, large and small. He leaned out and felt the bulging breastbones. He squeezed their meat, pinched the skin.

“There’s a beauty,” he admitted at last. “There’s a real Christmas turkey. Look at it. Look at the shape. The color. Feel the skin.”

“O-kay, take it,” I said, adjusting my muffler better, because the market chill was penetrating me.

“Not until I’ve been around and made sure,” said Jim.

“Aw, what the heck is this?” I called sharply.

“It’s a ceremony,” said Jim. “An old lady who doesn’t deserve it, is getting a lot of attention. And the best of it is, she will never know about it. All she gets is a turkey. But look what I get out of it.”

“I don’t see it,” I declared, following him again.

“Plenty wouldn’t,” agreed Jim.

So round and round the market we struggled, in the far corners, down the main aisle, and finally, after most thoroughly scrutinizing every turkey on display, we came back to the good one Jim had spotted in the first place; and bought it. At a price that was considerable. The farmer wrapped it with the special care farmers take in wrapping things up, and always vainly. For when he handed the monstrous package over the rough counter, turkey was protruding out of it in sundry places. But that’s the best part of parcels from the market.

Out to King St. we labored our way and into the car and back to the parking lot near the office. Jim locked the car doors carefully and we went back to the office for such work as a man can do Christmas week, with everybody coming in to see us and everybody telephoning from home to remind us what we have to bring home, and nobody’s mind on work anyway.

And at 5 p.m., we proceeded out into the night to go home in Jim’s car. There was mighty turkey, safely at rest upon the back seat.

“Let’s see,” said Jim, “did we have anything else to get before we go home?”

“Not me,” I stated.

And Jim, as though there was something on his mind, slowly got in behind the steering wheel and we drove down to the Lake Shore.

Half way home along that crowded and wintry highway, Jim suddenly cried:

“Ribbon.”

“Stickers,” I retorted.

“Hang it, I was told to bring home ten yards of red ribbon,” said Jim, as we bowled along in the traffic.

“And I was told to bring home a packet of Christmas stickers,” I confessed.

“We’ll turn up to Queen St.,” said Jim. “There are lots of little stores along there.”

So we edged our way out of the homing traffic and turned up one of the northerly exits from the Lake Shore and made our way to Queen St., at one of the sections of it filled with little stores, no less bright and gay than downtown.

“Get me ten yards of narrow red ribbon,” said Jim, as I got out at the first space we came to.

I entered a little shop and got the ribbon and two packets of assorted stickers, when the door opened with a jangle of bells and Jim came in.

“Gold string, too,” he said. “I forgot. A ball of gold string.”

So we got that and crossed the jamming traffic to our car and got back in.

“The turkey!” shouted Jim.

The turkey was gone.

Yes, sir, in less than three minutes, that turkey had been snaffled right off the back seat of the car. With the streets jammed and bright and roaring.

We leaped out and looked furiously in all directions. In a doorway, an elderly lady, who was sweeping slush off the step, signalled us:

“A young boy took a package out of that car,” she called. “I spoke to him but he said he was to deliver it across the street.”

“What did he look like?” Jim demanded.

“A nice young chap,” said the woman. “About 18 or so. A very nice-mannered boy.”

“Which way did he go?” I cried.

“Why, he walked right across the street, heading a little off that way,” said the lady, indicating east with her broom.

“Come on,” commanded Jim.

“He can’t be far ahead,” I submitted, as we dodged across the street.

“He can’t run with that parcel,” gasped Jim, running, “but we can.”

So we ran, ducking and nipping in and out of the street crowds, and keeping a sharp eye in all directions and in the store windows.

At the first corner, we asked a newsboy if he had seen a young fellow going by with a big parcel.

“Sure,” he said, “a guy just went up there in a hurry. With a turkey, I think.”

“That’s him,” shouted Jim, and up the dark little old street we galloped. Ahead, we made out a few pedestrians going and coming and a long way up, one figure in particular, a half-running figure and in his arms some kind of a load.

We ran. As we gained on him, he turned sharply into a sidewalk, and as he did so, we stopped running instantly, and made note of which house he was entering. When he disappeared, we began to run again until we came abreast, approximately, of the place he had turned. It was a shabby little narrow house, one of a dozen alike.

“I think it’s this one,” panted Jim.

“Take it easy, get our wind,” I gasped. So we walked up the pavement and stood in the shadow of the front door, and shadowy it was.

“The thief,” I muttered. “The dirty snatcher.”

“Young toughs,” panted Jim, “pinching Christmas turkeys right out of cars….”

“Will we turn him in? Should we get a cop first?” I asked.

“Get the turkey, before he hides it,” corrected Jim in a low voice. “Then we can report it. Probably some young gangster. Our word will be enough.”

Jim, peering and finding no bell, rapped loudly on the old blistered door.

No answer. He rapped loudly again.

“Footsteps,” whispered Jim

A light came on in the vestibule, there was a fumbling at the lock; and the door opened. There before us, silhouetted against the light, was a young fellow of about 17, still in his overcoat.

“We’d like to speak to you, me lad,” said Jim, sternly, pushing in. The young fellow backed ahead of him and I followed.

“Where’s the parcel?” demanded Jim, quietly, for fear of bringing tough reinforcements from the back of the house, where, from behind closed doors, sounds of excitement came. “Where’s the parcel you carried in here a minute ago?”

“What,” said the young scoundrel, in thick, husky voice, “what kind of parcel, mister?”

“A turkey,” said Jim, “wrapped in newspapers.”

The young fellow stood motionless in the pallid light and his head was hung so we could not see his face. It was a thin face. A thin, rather fine looking face on a young man so shabbily dressed, in coarse work clothes.

“Come on,” I said sharply.

“I’ll,” he said, barely audible, “I’ll go get it.”

“Make it snappy,” I repeated.

But still he stood, motionless, as if his legs were turned to lead. Still his hand was on the doorknob, clenched and white. And slowly he lifted his face. I do not suppose I should say it was a beautiful face. It is not right to say thieves have beautiful faces. But slowly he lifted it, not to us, but as if to God, maybe, and on it was a strange, white, thin, terrible expression of agony that I seemed to have seen before, somewhere, perhaps in old paintings was it, or maybe on little wooden carvings…

“Here,” said Jim, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” gasped the boy. But tears we soaking down over his thin checks. “Nothing.”

He let go the door knob and tried to turn and walk down the shadowy and narrow hall.

“Look here, a minute,” said Jim, grasping the boy’s sleeve. “Just a minute, kid. What’s all this? What did you pinch our turkey for?”

As if he hated to go down that hall, as if to open that distant door was to enter the presence of death itself, though sounds of life and joy came from behind it, he paused and turned, wearily, weakly.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I guess I went crazy.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded, to see if my voice would still work in the presence of that thin and beautiful young face.

“We had a raffle, at the plant,” whispered the boy.

“Oh, you’ve got a job?” Jim asked.

He nodded.

“What wages?” I inquired, for a stall.

“Six,” said the boy, “six dollars a week, in the shipping.”

“Go on,” I said, making it stern, but it came out cracked a little around the edge.

“We had a raffle at the plant. It was for a turkey, and I told them I was going to win it for sure,” said the boy, wearily. “We had the draw today, and I didn’t win.”

“Who’s they?” asked Jim.

“My mother,” whispered the boy. “My mother and kid sister, in there.”

He nodded heavily back down that dim and terrible hall.

“So….,” he leaned against the wall. “So, on the way home tonight, I happened to look in that car…. I don’t know what happened to me. I just don’t know, I guess. I don’t remember. I looked in… it seemed to be a turkey, a great big turkey…. I opened the door, I grabbed it….”

And suddenly his head fell down on his chest, his hands went to his face and Jim’s arm was around the boy’s shoulders and I had hold of his arm, tugging at it to get his hands down from his face; and in a little while, for fear of disturbing anybody down that long, long hallway to death and disaster, we went out in the cool and reviving night; and stood on the dark steps and waited, not with many words, but with a lot of pats and slaps on the back and little swear words men use to show that they have hearts like steel; and when he was all straightened up and tidied, we shook hands a with him as man to man, since all God’s children have wings, and only by the grace of God are we not all thieves nailed to little crosses. And much slower than we came up, we went down that street and got into the car and drove to Sunnyside before either of us spoke.

Then Jimmie spoke first.

“The old lady,” he said, “gets the second-best turkey.”

---

Editor’s Note: $6 a week in 1938 is only $121 in 2022.

This story appeared in The Best of Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise (1977).

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 14, 1935.

“How,” asked Jimmie Frise, “are your legs this year?”

“For what?” I inquired.

“For Christmas shopping,” said Jim. “If you recollect, you said last year you were never again going to get caught in this last terrible crush.”

“I’m glad you reminded me,” I said. “I must get busy at once.”

“It’s too late,” decreed Jim. “Too late. Already it is as much as your life is worth to go shopping. Yesterday, even I, big as I am, nearly got massacred trying to buy a leather book cover to send away to a friend in B.C. What a little man like you will do, when you get caught in the jam, I can’t imagine. It must be specially embarrassing at Christmas time to be small.”

“What do you mean, specially embarrassing?” I demanded. “I’m not embarrassed by my size. I find it an advantage just as often as you find your extra length an advantage.”

“Sorry,” soothed Jim. “But if there is any way I can be of assistance to you, this next few days doing your Christmas shopping, I’ll be glad to render it.”

“Thank you so much,” I replied.

“If I were you,” went on Jim, “I’d employ rugby tactics. In these hard times you could go to any employment agency and hire, say, four big huskies, ex-Varsity rugby players even, for three hours a day. At prevailing wages, say fifty cents an hour, there would be only $6 expenses additional to your Christmas bills. Yet, with two good line plungers ahead of you and two behind, with you in the middle like the quarterback, I bet there isn’t a department in the whole city that you couldn’t get to.”

“It’s not a bad idea, Jim,” I said. “Not a bad idea at all.”

“It is time that somebody thought up some practical use for rugby,” went on Jim. “Here are hundreds of our bright young men taking their academic degrees in rugby, yet when they get out into the world they find no practical use whatever for their learning. I suggest you get a bodyguard of four ex-rugby players, Varsity men preferred on account of their good manners. And with these before and aft you can finish up your Christmas shopping in one wild morning. The whole business. Just blast your way into the markets of the city.”

“I have half a mind to do it,” I declared.

“It would take just about half a mind,” agreed Jim. “Anyway, I don’t charge anything for bright ideas like that. You can have it free.”

“Thanks,” I said. “On the other hand, I don’t see why, in a free country, I have to go to extra expense to enjoy my rights. I have as much rights on the streets of this city as any man living.”

“Or any woman,” helped Jim. “It is the women that butt you around worst in Christmas shopping.”

“Quite right,” I confessed. “But what I am getting at is this business of freedom. All men are free and equal in this Canadian democracy. Then why do I have to hire four pug-uglies to help me do my Christmas shopping, just because people resort to violence? Must I meet violence with violence?”

“My Hard-Won Rights”

“Democracy is funny,” said Jim. “It is fine so long as everything is quiet and pleasant. But just let a little urgency come into the scene and in a flash of a second, phooie goes democracy and we are right back where we belong, that is, the victory to the strong.”

“It’s outrageous,” I stated. “For what have all my ancestors died, then?”

“Now don’t go dragging in your ancestors,” warned Jim.

“Well, I mean all our ancestors,” I explained. “For what have they fought and struggled all through the ages but to give us greater freedom? And yet, every Christmas, I get butted and bumped and elbowed and bellied, I get shoved and pushed and stepped on, I head for the glove counter and a stampede catches me and I end up at the neckwear counter. My hat is pushed over my eyes or knocked off altogether. I have several times lost my hat entirely during the Christmas rush. Why? Because people forget what our forebears bled and died for, and they resort to just plain brute force again.”

“I don’t see anything for it,” said Jim, “but for you to hire a gang of rugby scrimmagers.”

“I’ll be jiggered if I will,” I cried. “It would be surrendering my rights. My hard-won rights. Where do we get off if we all thus easily surrender the rights won for us by freedom-loving men? I tell you, we ought to start an agitation. We ought to remind people of their rights.”

“You mean,” said Jim, “that if we reminded everybody of their rights everybody would stop pushing.”

“I mean my rights,” I shouted. “I want to remind everybody of my rights, and then they’ll stop pushing.”

“Pushing you,” mused Jim.

“Exactly; it’s me I am worried about. I don’t care if they push one another. All I want them to do is stop pushing me. And I tell you I am not going to put up with it. I’m going to make a case of it. I’m going to stand my ground. And I’ll do it, by George, without any rugby players to help me. If there were a few more men like me in this world justice would not be so feeble. Robert the Bruce and Wallace who bled didn’t let people shove them around, by golly.”

“No,” said Jim, “but they had a few rugby players with them.”

In the afternoon, when I put on my hat and coat with grave determination, Jimmie looked up from his drawing board.

“Going shopping?” he asked.

“Right,” I said.

“I’ll come along,” said he. “I’ve a little to do myself.”

And we went north into the battle zone together.

At each intersection with lights, jams of harried-looking people massed to wait the crossing. At the first of these, Adelaide St., a large, shabby man, with an absent and faraway expression on his face, came from behind me, and with the utmost unconcern elbowed me aside and thrust himself to the front of the crowd.

“Here,” I shouted, “what do you mean, shoving me aside like that!”

And I seized his sleeve.

The crowd all went tip-toe to see. The big, shabby man turned a flushed and startled face to me.

“I’m sorry,” he said, really apologetic. “I didn’t even see you.”

“Haw, haw,” said the crowd. And then the lights changed.

I let most of them go ahead, and when Jim and I fell in the rear of the procession Jim argued:

“There you go; the poor chap really didn’t see you. And his retort was far more crushing to your dignity than the shove he gave you. Nobody noticed him shove you, but twenty people heard his come-back.”

“Skip it,” I requested.

Like Logs in a Wild River

 We proceeded up Bay St. By lingering as we came near the intersections we escaped the jams. But none the less, as we slowed down, no fewer than two men went by us with big, hurried strides, both of whom gave me slight but none the less impatient little butts with their shoulders or elbows as they went by.

“Maybe,” said Jim, “we are infringing on the rights of the public by walking so slow at this busy season.”

“Nonsense,” I said. But at the same instant an elderly man gave me a quite deliberate butt, as he passed, and he turned indignantly and growled:

“If you have no place to go, why clutter up the streets?”

“Thooop,” I instantly responded, being a raspberry I gave him. I find a raspberry from a middle-aged gentleman is the most surprising of all retorts, and I use it extensively on those more-middle-aged than myself.

The old man purpled and thrust ahead angrily.

Thus we came to the main corners and flung ourselves, without principle or belief, into the maelstrom and got across. In the store I let Jim go first, until he lost me. When I caught up to him he said I had better go first and he would defend the rear. But this was worse, as we now had no wedge or advance to crash our way into the throng. So Jim and I eddied along until we came to a sort of alcove, and we rested there.

“They don’t seem to be going anywhere,” I snarled as the mob surged by, like logs in a wild river. “Look at them. Just waddling along, with six-inch steps, and all craning their necks. They don’t even know where they are going.”

“Maybe this is the herd instinct we’ve read about,” thought Jim. “And nine-tenths of them aren’t doing any shopping at all, but just revelling in the fleshy thrill of being herded together with their kind.”

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I am not going to stand here like a fool. How humiliating, to be just eddied off into this alcove, like scum in a backwater. Let’s go.”

“Where?” asked Jim.

“Gloves,” said I.

“Hold to my coat tail,” called Jim, leading on.

Above me, I could see Jim towering, his head and shoulders weaving from side to side as he labored and toiled, like a man caught in deep snowdrifts. Beside me, I saw and felt a living, writhing mass of human legs, hips, elbows; I heard the frantic cries of unseen little children; the grunts of men, the groans of women. I felt us heaved, as in a volcanic eruption, far to the left; then, far to the right, I saw bits and glimpses of the tops of high piles of merchandize, colored cloths, handbags, kimonos; I heard the insistent din of a vast market place, with its hum, its roar, its high cries cutting across. I closed my eyes. I suited my pace to Jim’s, slow and fast, and clung to his coat tail.

We came to a stop.

“Gloves?” I muffled.

“Neckwear,” said Jim.

“Let’s,” I shouted, leaning back so my voice was clear of his enshrouding coat tail, “get the heck out of here.”

And after a few timeless moments of heaving, slowly waddling, shoving, pressing, we gained a door and burst out into God’s free air.

“Your face,” said Jim, “is purple.”

“Please,” I gritted. “Don’t speak.”

“Have you ever noticed any apoplexy in yourself?”

“Please,” I hissed. And we started back along for Bay St.

“Jim,” I said, in a voice quivering with emotion, “if this is civilization, I am through with it.”

“Do your shopping in November,” replied Jim.

“People,” I stated, “have no right to behave like that. It is inhuman.”

“I didn’t mind it,” said Jim, lightly. “I kind of enjoyed it. You should have seen some of the funny things. The faces, the expressions. One fat lady, talking to a salesgirl and being relentlessly shoved along the counter, farther and farther, until she was pushed right out of the department, and her yelling back at the sales girl.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“The general expression,” said Jim, “is one of abject resignation. A sort of dumb suffering.”

“To think that Adam and Eve have come to this,” I snorted.

“Look out,” said Jim.

“Look out,” sharply snapped young bit of a kid dressed in a white coat and apron.

“Look out what?” I demanded haughtily.

“Get off that,” shouted the boy, disrespectfully.

“Get off that,” repeated Jimmie, pointing at my feet.

Five or six people all stopped and looked.

I looked, too, and saw I was standing on a sort of iron double door set in the pavement. As I looked, I felt it quiver.

“Why,” I asked the saucy youth, “should I get off it? What right have you to ask me to get off …”

I felt the iron doors under me give a heave.

“Get off,” shouted Jim, snatching at my coat sleeve.

“I won’t get off,” I roared. “This is the pub …”

“Quick,” yelled the boy in white. “Snappy!”

It seems the man underneath the iron doors heard, through the small crack now widening, the command to make it snappy, and he thought it was meant for him. So whatever he was doing to make the doors open, he did faster.

With this result. The doors, on which I was standing, one foot braced firmly on each side of the crack, like any Britisher worth his salt would do, especially when his rights were being challenged, suddenly burst wide asunder, and a sort of elevator from below, laden with large ash cans, thrust powerfully upward.

Thus my two feet were spraddled rapidly farther and farther apart, the gap yawning enormously, until my legs could reach no wider, and as the ash cans rose up, I was dropped, heavily, on top of them.

And a vast cloud of dust rose up, as the elevator popped to street level with a clang, and it took Jimmie several seconds, fumbling about, to locate me and assist me to my feet.

By this time, there was a big crowd of people. The saucy youth was loudly demanding witnesses to the fact that he had warned me off the iron trapdoors.

“What is the matter with him?” asked two elderly ladies, as Jimmie dusted me off vigorously.

“Too much Christmas,” said Jim.

“I wondered,” said the kindlier-faced of the two ladies. “I saw him straddle that door. I have often been unable to sleep at nights for thinking of this very thing happening to me. But I understand. He’s such a nice-looking little man, too. Do you know his family? Can you get him home?”

“Madam,” I shouted, “mind your affairs.”

“Mercy me,” said the lady, and she and most of the others gradually lingered away.

We reached Bay St.

“I,” I stated, “am going to take this matter to law.”

“I think,” said Jim, “you will find there is a city by-law governing those trap doors. And it will provide that so long as a man is stationed above to warn pedestrians off the doors, they have a perfect …”

“Warn me off,” I laughed bitterly. “Order me off. Chuck me off the public highways. Push me about, shove me, elbow me, shout at me, and finally drop me into an ash can!”

“Christmas will soon be over,” soothed Jim.

“Liberty,” I laughed hollowly. “Justice. Freedom.”

“Just a few more days,” admonished Jim.

“Heh, heh, heh,” I sneered.

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Editor’s Notes: Robert the Bruce and William Wallace were well known for their role in the First War of Scottish Independence.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, December 13, 1947.

“Let’s,” urged Jimmie Frise, “let’s go up and see Santa Claus!”

“Awff …!” I groaned.

We were wedged in the main-floor Christmas crowds of the big department store. Up on the fifth floor, Santa Claus was holding court for hundreds and hundreds of kids.

“Jim,” I puffed, as a large lady with bundles butted me aside, “we don’t want to get tangled up in that melee.”

“We can take the escalator,” persuaded Jim, “and we won’t get hurt.”

“What on earth do you want to see Santa Claus for?” I demanded, taking shelter up against a solid pillar.

“I always like to see Santa Claus,” said Jim cheerily. “I wouldn’t think I had done my Christmas shopping unless I’d gone up to the toy department and stood for a little while, watching those kids filing along past Santa Claus, with that lovely, innocent look of awe.”

“You’ve got two weeks till Christmas,” I pleaded. “You come up some other day – by yourself.”

“Look,” said Jim, bracing himself against the butting, shoving, trampling horde that stampeded around us. “We’ve got an hour with nothing to do. We’re here. Let’s get it over with.”

“I’ve given up believing in Santa Claus,” I submitted. “In fact, I find myself leaning a little in the direction of these new fangled psychologists who believe it’s wrong to teach children myths, like Santa Claus.”

“Okay, then,” declared Jim, taking me by the coat sleeve firmly. “Come and have one farewell look at the old boy. Every day from now on it will be harder to get in here.”

I permitted myself to be good-naturedly bundled through the mob toward the escalators.

The stupor of Christmas was already in full possession of the multitude in the big store. The stupor of Christmas. It begins to show itself even earlier than this. You can detect the first faint symptoms of Christmas stupor as early as the first of December, both on customers and store clerks. By mid-December, the stupor is such, that often you will see both customer and clerk standing staring absently at each other across a counter, the customer having forgotten what he just asked for, and the clerk having apparently lost consciousness for a moment.

You find Christmas stupor most evident in the actual traffic of the store. In the walking, shuffling, wandering throngs of customers and store employees, you note that expression in the eye that is characteristic of a herd of cows moving along a country road. A look of wonderment. A look of anxious preoccupation, as if the cow or the customer didn’t know where it was going, or what it was going for. And like a cow or a steer wandering along the road with the herd, the customer often takes a sudden idea to turn to the right or the left, without any particular purpose.

Christmas stupor, of course, is part of Christmas. I we didn’t get stupid, we would all stay home the month before Christmas. Thus business would get the biggest black eye in the biggest period of sales in the year. Business would fail. A slump would begin. We’ve all got to be stupid at Christmas.

Jimmie steered and propelled me ahead of him resolutely through the fighting throng. Being taller than I, he could set his course with greater advantage. Where he could see ahead of us a mass of young, middle-aged or healthy customers, he would make a quick detour or tack to the right or left, choosing children, feeble old ladies and unsuspecting women of the frailer sort, with their backs to us, whom we could butt, trample or ricochet off; making our progress much faster and more skilful than the average. I figure the average speed of a person in a Christmas crowd to be at the rate of 40 feet in five minutes, or one-eleventh of a mile per hour.

We reached the escalators and entered the crowd, jammed there awaiting their turn. We finally shuffled and inched our way on to the escalator and began the slow, rumbling upward journey of five storeys. One of the pleasantest places to be in the big stores at Christmastime is on an escalator. Nobody can really get a jab or a gouge at you there. About the only thing that can happen is to have your hat knocked off by the skis or the ironing board the lady in front of you is carrying.

“Ah,” I sighed with relief, as the pleasant ascent began.

“I’ll tell you another reason,” began Jim, in the conversational isolation of the escalator, “why I want to go up and see Santa Claus and the kids. It’s for my soul’s sake. It’s for my intellectual reassurance. In this day and age, when so many beliefs are toppling, it is mighty heartening to behold ONE belief that is standing fast against the rising tides of unbelief.”

“Even if it’s a myth,” I agreed, “like Santa Claus.”

“Well, most beliefs,” pointed out Jim, as we swung round and took the escalator from second to third floor, most beliefs contain a certain element of myth. Every generation, or at least every century, we see our beliefs shedding some of the mythical elements they used to contain. For example, my old grandfather used to believe that his ‘betters’ had the right to govern him. He was always referring to his ‘betters’. The preacher, the schoolteacher, the local banker, the owner of the sawmill – all these were his ‘betters’; and he frankly acknowledged them as such. Today, the guy who runs the elevator doesn’t look upon the president and vice-president of this store as his ‘betters’. He looks them bung in the eye. And the president and the vice-president say ‘Hi, Bill!'”

“Would you call that a myth?” I questioned. “That belief in your “betters’?”

“It’s the Santa Claus myth in adult form,” explained Jimmie. “For the kids, we have Santa Claus. For ourselves, we have had – until quite lately in human history – a mythical belief in our rulers, emperors, princes, lords, bosses, who would be Santa Claus to us and shower us with blessings.”

“The Santa Claus myth,” I pondered, “in adult form!”

“Sure,” pursued Jim. “There isn’t an employee in this whole city, who, this week, isn’t hoping and praying that Santa Claus, in the shape of their boss, is going to give them a Christmas bonus.”

“Er …” I argued.

But we had come to the top of the escalator at the fifth floor; and we knew by the different tone of the din, by the higher, shriller hum, that we were close to the toy department, with Santa Claus enthroned on high.

It is easy for adults to progress with fair rapidity in the toy department. By a judicious use of knees, feet, elbows and the flat of the hand, an adult can really push, kick and shove children out of the way with a freedom that is denied him in other departments of the big stores at Christmas.

We worked our way through the pandemonium to a position square in front of Santa Claus’s throne, where we could observe the pantomime at its best.

Santa Claus sat in a throne raised on a platform about 10 feet high. A ramp of planks, prettily painted, led up to and past Santa Claus, so that the little ones could file past him in endless queue.

“Ah,” sighed Jimmie, relaxing. “Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that touching?”

Santa Claus, dressed in scarlet, gold and white, with a mass of white beard and hair surrounding his ruddy face, reached down and lifted a darling little girl on to his knee. Up to him, she turned her trusting and adoring little face, her eyes ablaze with faith. We could not hear Santa, of course, because of the din of the toy department – electric trains rattling, horns blowing, dirty little boys playing tag with store detectives and maiden lady clerks, toy dogs yelping, mamma dolls mewing and disgruntled small children screaming while being yanked by their mothers through the press.

Nor could we hear what the little girl asked for. But we could see dear old Santa nodding his head emphatically to the darling little girl, and she went right on rapidly lisping her requirements, with bright upturned face, until Santa Claus laid her down off his knee and reached for the next supplicant.

“Greedy little brats!” I remarked.

“Oh, oh, OH!” protested Jimmie, anguished. “You miss the whole spirit of Christmas.”

“Just a minute, Jim,” I interrupted. “Look at Santa Claus, would you! Look at the way he’s twisting and turning…”

Santa, in between bending down to listen to the children on his knee, kept twisting and writhing on his throne, casting what seemed to be anguished glances to the right and to the left, back of the wings of the throne on which he sat.

“By golly, look at his face!” agreed Jim.

Looking narrowly, you could see, through the white clouds of whiskers, an expression of agony.

And at this instant, I heard my name being called!

“Oh, Mr. Clark… Mr. Clark!”

It was my old friend Bob Brittain, the assistant manager of the toy department, and he was clawing his way through the kids toward me, beckoning. He came up and stood breathless for a moment, controlling himself.

“Look,” he gasped, “I saw you in the crowd… how would you like… I mean… this is an extraordinary request… but you know…”

“What is it, Bob?” I asked cautiously,

“Santa Claus,” went on Bob, “has got an awful attack of indigestion. Tight indigestion. He’s simply got to get some baking soda and lie down for a few minutes… 10 minutes…”

Bob looked at me with intense meaning.

 “You…” he said, “you’ve got the build, the jolly red face…”

“You mean…?” I inquired stiffly.

“It would be an unforgettable experience for you,” explained Bob Brittain eagerly. “Only for a few minutes…

“But the kids,” I protested, “the kids would be willing to wait a few minutes, if Santa Claus went and lay down…”

“Oh, you can’t do that!” cried Bob. “You can’t let the kids know Santa Claus gets indigestion. Besides, the department is jammed with kids wanting to speak to Santa Claus. Their parents are waiting impatiently. We can’t let them down, keep them waiting…”

“Isn’t there somebody on the staff of the store?” I inquired, though Jimmie was pushing me with little nudges.

“I’ve been all over the place, we can’t spare a single clerk. The department is rushed off its feet!” said Bob.

“Okay,” I condescended, with a chuckle. “Where’s the harm?”

Bob led us back of the scenery behind the throne. At a whistle, Santa Claus came staggering off the stage, holding his stomach.

In a jiffy, he had whipped off his costume, whiskers, wigs, hat and all. An anguished little fat man with perspiration on his face stood revealed.

Jim, Bob and half a dozen others stuffed me into the costume. Slammed the whiskers and wig on me. Helped me into the boots.

Just talk deep and hearty,” hissed Bob, “and laugh ho, ho, ho! And promise them everything.”

I was shoved on to the stage, where I hastily took my throne.

The queue of children were yelling, the mob on the floor were waving and screaming. I reached out genially and picked the first child in the lineup onto my knee.

“Ho, ho, HO!” I bellowed in a deep voice.

It was a raggedy little boy I found staring up into my whiskers. A raggedy little boy with a dirty face and gimletty gray eyes. He had his teeth clenched and his jaw set.

“Ho, ho, ho!” I repeated. “And what would my little man like…?”

“Yah!” screeched the dirty little boy, reaching and grabbing a handful of my whiskers. “This ain’t the real Santa Claus! He ain’t got a voice like that! He’s a fake… a fake… a fake…!”

And with a jerk, he had my whiskers, wig and beautiful hat off, and gave me a nasty kick in the shin as he jumped and ran.

I made a grab at him. It was to get my whiskers back. But Jim, who was watching from the wings, said it certainly looked more like a swift uppercut I aimed.

At all events, the next children in line apparently were chums of the dirty little boy. For they jumped me, yelling “fake” and even worse. And before Jim or Bob or anybody else could come to my rescue, the whole department full of children seemed to be piled on top of me, tearing and kicking and scratching.

“Just,” I huffed, as they undid me from my costume back stage, “just another myth exploded!”

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 5, 1933.

“Let’s,” said Jimmie Frise, “do something.”

“We are always doing something,” I snarled, “and getting nowhere.”

“By doing something,” said Jimmie, “I mean something unusual. Something we ought to do. Something that has to be done anyway.”

“Such as paying our bills, you mean?”

“Never!” cried Jimmie. “I mean just the opposite. Let’s buy something. Let us, for instance, do our Christmas shopping.”

“In August?” I cried. “With our collars wilted and our shirts creeping up our backs?”

“Let’s do our Christmas shopping early,” said Jim. “Let’s shop early and avoid the rush.”

“The heat has affected you,” I said.

“Why wait until the last mad rush?” cried Jimmie. “Now is the time to do your Christmas shopping, when the stores are not crowded and the salespeople are at liberty to attend to your wants.”

“You sound like an advertisement.”

“Buy now and put your gifts away until Christmas,” went on Jimmie, who really did look as if the heat had touched him.

“The salespeople would think we were nuts,” I said.

“Not at all,” cried Jim. “It would be a treat for them. Think of all those salespeople, fifteen thousand of them in the big stores alone, all toiling away from morning to night with nothing much to amuse them. Then, along we come, doing our Christmas shopping.”

“You can’t amuse salespeople in the summer,” I submitted.

“Listen,” said Jim, tensely, “I’m tired of doing the same old thing. I’m going out and do my Christmas shopping. Are you coming or aren’t you?”

So we went and did our Christmas shopping.

“Where do we start?” I asked Jim.

“We will walk around the stores,” said Jim, “and get some ideas. Take a general survey first.”

We strolled through the big stores. It was a hot day and everything was moving at a pleasant gait. The customers had faraway expressions on their faces, as if they were thinking of canoes and verandas. We walked through the basements and saw screen doors and frying pans, trunks and overalls. We walked through the main floors and saw carving knives and underthings, as Jimmie calls them, and silver trays.

Upstairs we walked through miles and miles of colored cloth, dresses, coats, scarves, bathing suits, furniture, floor coverings, live pets, plumbing fixtures.

“I haven’t seen anything for Christmas yet,” I said.

“Take your time,” said Jim. “Let’s ask one of the managers for some ideas.”

We came upon a gentleman standing in the middle of the main aisle, hands behind his back.

“Pardon me,” said Jimmie. “We are doing our Christmas shopping early. We were wondering if there were any new things we should see. Any novel Christmas gifts on display.”

The gentleman looked sharply at the nearest window. Took out his watch and looked at the time. Then stared shrewdly at us.

“Christmas goods?” he asked. “Did you say you are doing your Christmas shopping?”

“Yes,” said Jim, eagerly. “We are avoiding the rush.”

“I see,” said the manager, “now there is a nice cool place over here where you can sit down and rest while I get somebody to attend to you.”

He led us, walking slightly sideways so as to watch us, over to a bench and left us.

“He’s gone to get the doctor or the store detectives,” I said to Jimmie. “Let’s get out of this.”

“Nonsense,” said Jim. “He’s gone to get one of those shopper’s advisers they have in all the big stores. A pretty girl to guide us.”

But in the distance we saw the manager talking to a man in a derby hat, so we quietly got up and took the stairs down one floor.

“Well,” I said sarcastically, “how about it? Where do we go from here?”

“Let’s sit down somewhere and write out a Christmas list,” said Jim. “Here’s a bench. Now, first the wife.”

And the two of us wrote down the usual list, wife, children, mother-in-law, Bill, Margaret, Art, the Old Man, and so on.

“We’ll do it together,” said Jim. “I buy my wife’s present and you buy yours, and we will be a big help to each other. We will do it methodically. Now I’ll start. I think I’ll get my wife one of those sets of scissors. You know, a leather thingummy, with about four or five assorted sizes of scissors in it. We never can find the scissors in our house.”

“That’s hardly a personal gift,” I commented. “How about mauve silk underthings?”

“You think up your own gifts,” said Jim. “I know my wife’s tastes.”

We found the scissors department and there was a magnificent display of all kinds of scissors, razors, knives, forks.

“We are doing our Christmas shopping,” smiled Jim at the Old Country gentleman in charge of scissors. “I want a nice set of scissors in a leather case.”

The gentleman looked us over and before getting the scissors he stopped to lift four or five carving knives off the showcase and set them out of reach on the back of the counter.

There were sets of three, made in the fashion of storks flying. There were cold, clever-looking sets of four in various sizes. Jimmie looked them over, but said as they were to be a Christmas gift he would like a little fancier leather case. As we walked along the counter we came to the hunting knives.

“Ah,” cried Jim, “here’s the very thing! A beautiful hunting knife! The very thing. I never go anywhere with my wife in the out-of-doors that she doesn’t borrow my old hunting knife. She ruins the edge. She breaks the point. I’ll get her her very own hunting knife.”

Using the Sign Language

The Old Country gentleman lifted two or three carving forks off the counter and stood well back.

“Jimmie,” I cut in, “a hunting knife is hardly a present for a lady.”

“Well, I could give it to John,” said Jimmie.

John is not yet two.

“Jimmie,” I reproached him.

“That is when he gets older,” said Jimmie.

So we took a fine $3.50 hunting knife in a bright leather scabbard, and Jim struck his wife’s name off the Christmas list.

“Now,” said Jim, “your wife next.”

“Underthings,” I said. “Mauve.”

We proceeded to the underthings department, at the back of which is a special sort of half-secret place where the very finest of underthings are kept by the most discreet and understanding of young ladies. They understand what you want by signs. You hardly have to speak. I have been dealing there for fifteen years and they know me and understand my sign language, so that in twelve of those fifteen years I have never said more than good-day and thank you to them.

“You aren’t going in back there?” exclaimed Jimmie.

“Come on,” I commanded.

We marched right into this soft and quiet sanctum and one of the girls remembered me and came forward making signs.

“Christmas,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Usual,” I said. “Two sets.”

“Color?” asked the girl.

“Mauve,” I said.

She went away and Jim said:

“Gosh, if it’s easy as this I’m going to do it, too.”

The girl came back with mauve things over her arm.

“Christmas,” I repeated.

The girl raised her eyebrows again.

“November,” she said. “New stock. This pretty light. Summer stock. Get later.”

“Right,” I said.

She went away with the mauve things and came running back.

“But,” cried the girl, “have you seen the silk for men? Just new. It’s quite all right to talk about men’s things, isn’t it? We don’t have to make signs now, do we?”

“I think reticence applies only to the ladies’ things,” I said.

“Then come on down here,” cried the girl. “I’ve got some stuff just in from England. Men’s silk. It will be going downstairs to the men’s shop to-night. But it was in our shipment and I want you to see it.”

Scarlet, green, blue shorts of slithery, slippery silk. Orange, polka dot and purple shirts to disagree with the shorts.

It did not take me two minutes to pick three suits, because like most men doomed to wear drab on the outside I like a little color on the sly.

“Will I send it?” she asked.

“Nobody home,” I said. “Our wives are away, so we will have to carry our parcels.”

So I struck my wife’s name off my list.

The next thing we did was the toy department for the children. Jim got his four girls some of the finest fishing tackle any girl ever received, and he got Baby John a dandy little fly rod. I got my boys a silk tent between them, a thing we have always needed. My daughter I got one of those bright umbrellas for the garden, and while she is only two the salesman said the color was a fast dye and would keep.

My mother-in-law I bought a huge set of copper ash trays, each one about as big as a dinner plate, because she is always complaining that I overflow the ash trays at home. Jim tried to get his Aunt Agnes an umbrella, but he couldn’t choose one from so many, so he got her instead one of those sit-down canes for the races.

“I can borrow it from her,” said Jim, “when I go to Thorncliffe.”

By this time our load of parcels was growing and the heat was not diminishing.

“Hadn’t we better leave some of the things till later?” I asked.

“Let’s get it over,” said Jim. “You can never tell when the rush will start.”

So Jimmie bought his cousin Harry a pair of cheap field glasses in case Harry ever got interested in racing, and I got my fishing partner, Bill, a beautiful red cedar canoe paddle.

“Has Bill a canoe?” asked Jim.

“No, but I’ll keep this in my canoe for the times Bill visits us,” I explained.

“There’s one thing about summer shopping for Christmas,” said Jim. “You can think of far more sensible presents for everybody. Near Christmas, you sort of get carried away by the Christmas spirit and you buy the silliest things.”

I got my brother Joe a book on wild birds and their music just to inspire his interest in this beautiful subject, and anyway I would have all summer, autumn and early winter to read it thoroughly before having to give it up. My brother Art I got a new novel I had read some thrilling reviews of in the paper. Jim doesn’t care for reading much. It tires the back of his neck. So he got two sets of “Famous Race Horses of the Past,” twelve handsome colored lithographs of world-famed thoroughbreds.

“I can give half of one set to Jake,” explained Jim, “and the other half of the other set to George. Six is a nice present. Both will be different. Then I’ll have the complete set for myself. You would never pause to figure things out like that in December.”

We were by this time pretty well loaded and our lists were practically exhausted. Jim still had his Cousin Pansy and an old uncle on his list, but try as we would we could think of no suitable gift for either of them. I had one or two on mine, but they were the sort of people you could leave to the last minute and then give them a box of cigars when they called on you Christmas afternoon.

Everybody was very helpful. It was extremely hot and we dropped things quite a bit as the afternoon wore on, but, as Jim said, how much nicer to get this over with now, even with the heat, than suffer all that struggling and bumping and hey-ing of sales girls in December.

With our families away, there was none of that hiding and concealing. For example, we set up the colored umbrella in my garden and then we tried out the silk tent. As the children wouldn’t be home till September we decided to leave them up, as with the tent you could get quite a kick by pretending you were camping.

Especially as Jimmie brought over his wife’s hunting knife and his daughter’s fishing tackle to try out, with Baby John’s rod.

“I’ll just keep them in my own tackle box,” said Jim, “so I’ll know where they are.”

With the paddle and the field glasses and the sit-down cane and so forth draped around the tent and us sitting under the striped umbrella, I reading and Jim gazing lingeringly at the lithographs of the horses, you could easily see how much better a thing it is to do your Christmas shopping in August.

---

Editor’s Notes: A store detective, was much more common in the past. They would walk around the store (usually big department stores) on the lookout for shoplifters.

Thorncliffe Park Raceway existed from 1917-1953. It used to exist in the location of the Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood in Toronto today.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 16, 1933.

“There’s an idea!” shouted Jimmie Frise, jamming on the brakes and bringing our car to a stop. In the night, grouped under a street light in the quiet residential neighborhood where we live were four men.

They were singing Christmas carols.

“Now,” said Jim, “that’s more like! Singing. The waits. There’s a dear old custom for you.”

We wound down the car windows and listened to the four voices singing “Good King Wenceslas.”

“It’s better,” I said, “than a cornet. A cornet wakes all the babies in the block.”

“This,” said Jimmie, “would soothe a child. Even a sick person would love to hear such sweet melody in the night.”

We sat in silence until the little choir concluded the rousing old tune of “King Wenceslas.” Then they dispersed, in four directions, to call at the doors for the artist’s reward.

“Let’s wait and hear them again,” said Jimmie. “I love to hear men singing. Not that new fangled jazz stuff. But a kind of barber shop quartet singing old songs.”

“I’m in no hurry,” I admitted. So we eased back and waited, while the dark figures passed from door to door.

“You know,” said Jimmie, “there is no music in the world as fine as a quartet of men singing old-fashioned songs, like ‘Sweet Adeline’ and ‘Way Down Upon the Swanee River.'”

“Yet I don’t care for these concert quartets,” I submitted.

“I know what you mean,” said Jimmie. “Singing deep sea songs, with silly choruses about the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, THE SEA, in an enormous bass voice, with all the tenors and the baritones repeating the sea, the sea, the sea, the SEEEAAAA!”

“Precisely,” said I.

“Well, all I can say,” said Jimmie, “in these days of sob-sissy tenors, and wuh-duh-duh husky baritones that would have got the hook at any burlesque show when we were boys, nobody knows the beauty of a quartet singing ‘Sweet Adeline’ on all the street corners, under the arc lights, all the way home.”

“The trouble nowadays,” I pointed out, “is that we are all listening to singing, but none of us sing.”

“And the important part of singing,” added Jim, “is not the hearing of it, but the doing of it.”

A Cold Reception

The shadowy figures of the carol singers were still humbly and hesitantly passing from door to door up the block.

“So much that is old is dying,” said Jimmie sadly. “We are removing all our roots out of the solid earth. We no longer play lusty games. We sit in grandstands. We no longer sing. We listen to the radio.”

“These lads here,” I said, “are probably Englishmen. They are likely unemployed. Maybe they can’t afford cornets and musical instruments. But likely they have sung carols over home, down the streets of old towns, like Stow-on-the-Wold, or Glastonbury, or St. Erth.”

“Or,” said Jimmie, remembering the glimpse he had, when he was a lad and a soldier, of a sweet far old land, “Winterbourne Bishop, or Newton Valence, or Pocklington.”

“In these towns,” I went on, “these men have sung carols, down crooked old streets, with lights in leaded windows glowing, and for their singing, the door would open, and they would be handed out sixpence and shortbread and porty wine.”

“And what do they get here?” asked Jim, peering out of the car up the chilly street, where the singers were coming now, slowly, rejoining into a group. “They might get a crack of the door open and a dime handed out in a cold hand. Or they might get nothing. I hear they are making great strides in the study of heart disease. I guess one of the things that is being corrected nowadays is the soft heart.”

“Here they come,” I said.

The four carol singers, all in a group. with hands in pockets and heads down against the winter wind, came walking by.

I stuck my head out the car window.

“Aren’t you going to sing some more?” I called to them.

They halted and looked at us.

“No,” said the tallest one. “Not any more.”

“Don’t they want you to sing?” called Jim.

“They said they didn’t hear us,” said the tall one, who had a bass voice. “When we called at the doors, they didn’t know what we wanted. I says, ‘Something for the carols?’ And they says, ‘What carols?'”

“Didn’t you get anything?”

“Not so far,” said the tall one. The others just pulled their necks down into their collars, and looked impatient to be off.

“Maybe you didn’t sing loud enough,” I suggested.

“The radio drowns us,” said the tall one, adding apologetically, for his companions, “a thing I didn’t think of.”

Appreciation is Curious

“Well, let’s be going, George,” said one of the others dryly.

“Wait a minute, boys,” said Jimmie. “Us two liked your singing. We’ll gladly pay you for it. How would you like to sing that ‘King Wenceslas’ for us once more?”

“If there’s something in it,” said the tall one. The others reluctantly grouped themselves around him. Lifting his hand, George sang a key. They sang:

“Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen

When the snow lay all about

Deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shone the moon that night,

Tho’ the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight

Gathering winter fuel.”

Quietly they sang, with Jim and me sitting in the car and they standing on the kerb in the night. Strange how quickly tears will spring to the eyes at the call of certain old words, though all about us the facts of life touch never a pool of them!

They sang softly, but without spirit, because it was strange to be standing on the kerb of a great city, singing into the window of a car to two men, while other cars hissed by and people, passing, paused to stare. And their hearts were not in it anyway.

But appreciation is a curious thing. Maybe they saw the tears in my eyes in the street light. Maybe they saw the way Jimmie stared through the windshield. But in the second verse, they seemed to get a grip of the ancient song. They didn’t have good voices, as voices go. Their words were sung with quaint accents. But there was a simple breathlessness in their feeling.

When they ended on the last queer chord, Jim and I dug down and gave them some money.

“Thank YOU,” said the carolers. “Thank you very much!”

“I think we could give the gentlemen “The First Nowell’,” said George, the tall one, heartily. And eagerly they closed together again, setting themselves the way all good singers do.

“The First Nowell the angel did say

Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay,

In fields where they lay keeping their sheep

On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.

Nowell, Nowell, Nowell, Nowell.

Born is the King of Israel!”

How they sang! How they fled the voices all sweetly in together. How they held the last Nowell, harmonizing it, moulding it, coloring it!

Taking the Gents On

By this time, a number of people who walked past had halted and listened and crept back. A little gathering was forming. A car ran by, slowed and backed and the doors opened for the people inside to hear the better.

They finished “The First Nowell’ and stood embarrassed, wondering whether they should go now. But a lady who had come back to listen asked:

“Didn’t I hear ‘Good King Wenceslas’ a little while ago?”

“Yes, mam.”

“I wonder …?” she said. So the lads grouped together again and gave ‘Good King Wenceslas.’

There were fifteen of us by the time they ended. George took off his hat and everybody put something into it.

“You see,” said Jimmie, as George leaned over to say good-night to us, “if they can hear you, they love it. The trouble is, to be heard. There should be more of you. A regular choir. With lots of strong voices.”

“Ah, it’s hard to say,” said George, shaking his head.

“Well, now, my friend and I,” said Jimmie, “are both very fond of singing. Old-fashioned singing. If you will get in the car with us, and we could go to a neighborhood where we aren’t known, we’d be glad …”

“Jimmie!” I hissed.

“We’d be glad to join our voices, just to show you,” said Jim.

“Do you sing?” asked George.

“Well, we know the tune, and we can sort of hum with our mouths open,” said Jim. “You know, Doo-doo-doo-de-doo-de-dum, da-de-dad-de-tum-tum.”

George looked doubtful. One of the smaller ones, the tenor, I think it was, cried:

“Take the gents on, George, a ride in the car will do us good anyways!”

So we loaded the four of them in the back seat and drove five or six blocks north, and parked up a pleasant side street with those nice $7,000 homes on it, where young married people live, with small children’s sleighs and hockey sticks on the verandas waiting for the morning.

“I am sorry,” I explained to George and the boys, “I don’t sing at all. I have a loud voice. But there is not much tune in it, if you understand.”

“It will attract attention, anyway,” interrupted Jimmie. “That’s all we need. You fellows can do the singing, after we have added our volume to the music and attracted people from their radios. Understand?”

Artistry Runs Wild

“Yes, sir,” said George. “Personally, I think it’s a splendid idea. First rate.”

We walked up a few doors and grouped under a street light.

“Now, we’ll do ‘King Wenceslas’ first,” said George, “as these two gentlemen seem to know that tune the best.”

He held up his hand. Sang the key.

“Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen …”

It was fine. I could sing the first few words, and then I resorted to daw-de-daw-daw-daw. You know. Like in church.

“Louder,” said Jimmie in my ear.

I let it out. My voice was trained in the army. At Napier Barracks, near Cheriton, when I was a raw recruit, I had to stand by the hour roaring commands at a drill sergeant standing scornfully a quarter of a mile off. He saw possibilities in my voice, and made the most of them. It is, if I may say so, loud.

“Let her out all the way,” shouted Jim in my ear.

I let it out all the way.

Jim was doing pretty good himself, although the only way he recognizes the tune of “God Save the King” is when everybody stands up and takes his hat off.

George and the boys were resolutely singing, with George standing apart, beating time for us and patting one hand in the air as if to signal me not so loud.

But certainly we were attracting attention. Doors opened. Lights went on in upstairs windows. Men and women even came out on the verandas.

“That’s the stuff,” cried Jimmie in my ear. “They’re coming!”

Though I am not a singer. I can appreciate the inspiration it must be to artists to behold response.

The third verse, I really shook loose the barnacles of the years that had been gathering in my lungs, the wrinkles and crows feet, the dust and ashes, and I gave them the old stuff, the real old roar that once upon a time could be heard all the way from Mount St. Eloi to Villers au Bois. Of course, I did not know the words of the third verse, so I had to resort to daw-daw-daw, interspersed with dee-dee-dee.

When you sing, or otherwise engage in a wholehearted artistic endeavor, you are temporarily blinded to what is going on around you. You see this in a bird. It pours out its whole soul, deafened to any other sound around it. Caruso must have felt like that as he leaped into the passionate arias of “Pagliacci” or that’ excited bit in the “Barber of Seville.” I must say I did notice some confusion amongst my fellow-singers. All but Jimmie. He stood right by me, apparently singing for all he was worth, but of course I could not hear him, because I had, what you might say, turned it on.

Maybe the Crooners are Right

By this time, all the houses were lighted, veranda lights were snapped on. Groups of people were not only assembling on the verandas but were coming out on the sidewalks. It was a triumph indeed.

It seemed to me, as I let go the last line of the third verse that there was a sort of scuffle amongst George and his pals, and the next thing I knew, I saw a man with a golf stick in his hands, and iron, a niblick, I think they call it, with a thick, twisted iron head, crouched down and advancing on me with cat-like tread.

I cut that last, choice chord of the last line, I cut it right off. Jim had me by the elbow and we were bounding, in long easy strides, down the street toward the car.

Jim slammed me in and leaped to the wheel. I saw, far up the street, the vanishing forms of what I take to have been George and his pals. They were running.

So Jimmie drove rapidly away, in the other direction, and after twisting and turning around several blocks, we slowed down and Jimmie gasped.

“Well,” he said. “It didn’t work!”

“You shouldn’t have encouraged me,” I said, miserably.

“I had no idea you had such a foghorn,” said Jim.

“Was it pretty awful?” I asked.

“Honestly,” said Jim, “I never heard such a noise in my life!”

“It’s funny,” I mused, “what a little encouragement will do to a man.”

“I guess every man,” said Jimmie, “thinks he can sing, deep down in his heart.”

“I can sing,” I protested. “But you said what we needed was loud singing.”

“Maybe the crooners are right,” said Jim. “Perhaps the popular taste these days is for that wuh-duh-duh stuff, that snuggle singing.”

So we went back to my house and up to my den where I have one of those old music boxes with the big steel discs with holes punched in them, that I got from an old relative of mine, and we spent the evening playing “The Mocking Bird” and “Darling Nellie Grey.”

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Editor’s Notes: Sweet Adeline and “Old Folks at Home” (also known as “Swanee River“) were songs from 1903 and 1851. When they were complaining about the song with “the sea, the sea, the sea,” it was likely “By the Beautiful Sea” from 1914.

A $7,000 house from 1933 would be $139,000 in 2021, though you could not find a house in Toronto for that price.

Metal disc playing music boxes pre-dated phonographs, where you could swap out the discs with different songs.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 18, 1937

“So help me,” said Jimmie Frise devoutly, “I’ll never get caught in this last-minute Christmas rush again. So help me.”

“Millions and millions of people all over the world,” I informed him, “are saying the same thing, this same minute, in a hundred different languages.”

“So help me,” declared Jimmie firmly.

“You said it last year,” I stated. “You will say it next year. And so will all the other millions and millions.”

“Never again, so help me,” reiterated Jim, fiercely.

“There wouldn’t be any Christmas,” I said, “if there were no Christmas rush. That is what Christmas has come to mean. A time of crowding and gathering and jostling. A time of joy and weariness, of feasting and visiting. Of buying and selling.”

“Yeah, commercialized,” accused Jim.

“No, not commercialized,” I corrected. “That’s an easy sneer at Christmas. But suppose Christmas were nothing more than a holy day on the calendar, can you imagine how it would go by? Just as unremembered as any other holy day. Do you recall what you did on Good Friday three years ago? Certainly not. But you can remember what you did three, five, ten Christmases ago; who was at your house; how the children acted, especially the youngest one. You can count back. You can count back ten Christmases, when your youngest girl was three. And close your eyes, and there you can see it, as clear as if it were yesterday. Why? Because that was the year she crashed the Christmas tree in her new scooter, or something. And then, bit by bit, the whole dear, tender picture returns to you, and you’ve got something. A memory.”

“That’s all very well,” protested Jim, “anybody can get sentimental over Christmas and try to gloss over the evils of it. But I say, this Christmas crush is getting tougher all the time. And believe me, I’m through with it.”

“Tougher?” I cried. “My dear boy, nowadays it’s nothing compared to what it was a couple of thousand years ago, the day all this is supposed to commemorate. Don’t you remember that it was so crowded there wasn’t any room at the inn, and Joseph and Mary had to find a manger, in a stable?”

“Aw,” said Jim.

“Crowded?” I continued. “The streets jammed with people from miles around, and donkeys and camels, their bells tinkling and their drivers shouting and complaining and the inns roaring with trade and all the little shops filled with fighting people, trying to get waited on. Crowded? And detachments of Roman soldiers down from Jerusalem to help the tax enumerators do their work, and them in all the best billets in the little town. And the government men turning the front rooms of the inn into offices to work on their tax rolls, and outside, all the lineage of David lined up in queues and wanting to be away home again about their business. Crowded? Jimmie, Christmas has to be a kind of panjandrum, in memory of that day.”

“What Have You to Get?”

“Well, we’ve succeeded,” agreed Jim. “And Christmas has become the worst-tempered season of the whole year. Everybody tired and worried over money, and shopgirls so gaunt and white looking, and delivery men sloshing through the night, and factory girls working overtime, and store keepers dizzy for want of rest, and everybody’s nerves on edge and ready to crack any minute.”

“Fine,” I exulted. “Glorious. Instead of camel drivers shouting, we have car horns yelling impatiently, and instead of Roman soldiers lounging around keeping the crowds moving, we have extra police on duty. It’s a perfect representation.”

“Have you finished your shopping yet?” demanded Jim, grimly.

“No, siree,” I assured him. “I’ve still got a few things to get. And I’m proceeding with it in the spirit of the season. I’m going to be shoved and pushed and tramped on, and camel drivers are going to shout me out of the path, and Roman soldiers are going to thumb me on my way imperiously. I will rub shoulders with all my brethren, poor and rich. I will see, thrust close to mine, faces I have never seen before, thousands of them, my brothers in life. I will be full of pride and contempt and anger, all of them warm, healthy feelings. I will be conscious of my own importance, as I am pushed around by people far beneath me in money and clothes. That too is a nice sensation. There will be a great hum and roar of low sound, the sound of a multitude, and to men, so afraid of being alone, that great sound is always curiously comforting. There will be buying, selling, choosing, selecting, deciding. There will be possessing.”

“What have you to get?” inquired Jim.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I assured him, “which is another grand part of the whole business. That glorious aimlessness with which the multitude wander through the stores and along the streets, undecided, indecisive, at a loss, bewildered. That’s the true spirit of Christmas, too.”

“That’s what makes me so mad,” disagreed Jim. “Me trying to go direct to the ladies’ glove counter and having to fight my way through a solid scrimmage of people who don’t want to go anywhere, or else don’t know where they want to go. That vacant stare, mixed with weariness and crankiness, that’s the expression of Christmas.”

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful,” I argued, “if at Christmas, everybody went trimly and smugly and smartly direct to what they wanted? How cold, practical, chilly, the whole business would be. No, Jim, it’s that complete breakdown of everything sensible and reasonable that makes Christmas what it is, the pinnacle of the year.”

“Well, if you don’t know what you want,” said Jim.

“Oh, I know roughly,” I explained, “that I want something for a boy of thirteen something for an elderly lady and something for a man, a tie or a cigarette tray or something casual.”

Everything Seems to Bulge

“We may as well go together,” said Jim, wanly. “I’ve got to get something for two of my girls and some other odds and ends. When you have somebody with you, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

“Come along,” I said.

And we entered the downtown streets which, even at nine a.m. are already congested and which, by four p.m. are just a hopeless slow tangle. Where do they come from? Are all the offices and desks and work benches abandoned, these last few days before Christmas? Is everybody shopping? The pedestrian traffic is trebled and the wheel traffic at least doubled.

Everything seems to bulge. The streets are congested, the windows are congested. Doorways are not wide enough and from the wagons and trucks parcels project perilously. People cannot pass one another, even in straight walking, but have to pause and bunt and wriggle around. At every doorway, there is confusion.

Nobody seems to have his mind on what he is doing, a general uncertainty prevails. People are all looking up, looking left, right or down. Their mouths are slightly open, as if listening to something inside them. They halt suddenly, turn around and return the way they had come. They burst into little trots. At the intersections, they impatiently attempt to cross against a red light, change their mind, stand dreaming, and then, when the green light comes on the people behind have to push them to get them started.

Jim and I got into the tide and drifted with it, storewards.

“How about an air rifle for that boy of 13?” said Jim, helpfully.

“No,” I said, “he got one two years ago. How about one of those nice needlepoint vanity cases for your girls?”

“No, they’ve got all that stuff,” said Jim. “Could you get your boy one of those metal hammering outfits?”

“He’s got one,” I replied. “Say, I saw some of the swellest ski outfits the other day for girls. Little helmet things….”

“No, no,” cried Jim. “They’ve got so much ski stuff. I think that’s what keeps the snow away. I wish I had boys to buy for. They’re so much easier to choose for than girls.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I assured him. “I can go right through a department store without seeing a single thing fit for a boy, and every place I look, I see something a girl would just love.”

“You wouldn’t think so,” said Jim, “if you had girls to look after. It’s just the other way round, as a matter of fact. The stores are simply bursting with stuff for boys, but there hasn’t been a new idea in the line of Christmas presents for girls in the last ten years.”

Going With the Current

 “You certainly are cockeyed, Jim,” I assured him, as we joined a great herd and charged across an intersection, bunting and shoving.

We arrived at the big stores. What had been the Niagara rapids of traffic here became Niagara Falls. Clinging together like mariners wrecked, we went with the raging currents, timidly daring to steer a course, whenever an eddy permitted, towards the elevators but ending up at the escalators instead. Trying to catch the up one, we were inexorably forced on to the down one, which took us to the basement, and there, by skillfully pretending not to want to reach the elevators, we succeeded in arriving there and caught one almost empty which took us to the seventh floor before we could battle our way free. By putting on an expression of joy as if the seventh floor were really seventh heaven, where we had been trying to get for years, we had hardly any trouble getting to the stairs, and we walked down three flights to the sporting goods department. Jimmie and I find one thing about the sporting goods department. In case we do get marooned there, we have something to look at.

“Roller skates,” cried Jimmie. “The very thing for your boy.”

“The very thing for your girl, you mean,” I corrected. “Anyway, they can’t roller skate in winter.”

One of the young temporary salesmen they have at Christmas, one of those boys with the expression of a mischievous wire-haired fox terrier in his eyes, overheard my remark.

“Let me show you, sir,” he said, “the latest thing. Here’s a floating power skate, a ball-bearing, knee-action roller skate that is so pleasant to use, a boy will ride on it winter, summer, in the rain, at night, all the time.”

Very skillfully, like a cowpuncher herding steers, he manipulated us out of the swarming traffic into a kind of pocket. And he handed us each a very fancy looking roller skate.

“A kid,” said the enthusiastic young salesman, “will be asking you for messages to go, if he has these skates, see? He’ll be out in the fresh air, taking easy, natural exercise all day long. They’re like velvet. They’re soundless, smooth, like floating in a canoe. Like blowing along on the wind. In fact, I’m saving my money to own a pair of those skates myself. sir.”

We examined them. They just looked like roller skates to me.

“I’d be having,” I said, “to buy new rollers, new wrenches, all the time. They’d leave marks all over the hardwood floors.”

“Just sit down here, sir,” said the young man. “Just sit here one second.”

I am always glad to sit. So is Jim. We sat. The young man squatted down and skillfully snapped a skate on to my foot.

“See?” he cried. “Modernized. A patent device. It just snaps on. Nothing to fall off or work loose. Just a second.”

He snapped the mate on.

“Now, sir,” he said, “just stand up on those.”

I stood up, cautiously, the young chap holding my elbows to steady me. He rolled me a foot or two.

“Did you ever,” he demanded, “feel anything so airy, so smooth, as the action of those skates?”

I took a couple of cautious slides, holding to the counter edge. It was certainly an eerie sensation. Floating is the word. I shoved myself pleasurably along the counter. When I turned, also cautiously, I saw that Jim had been outfitted with them and, being more leggy than I was trying a few slow curvy strokes with them, amidst the crowd swerving past.

“Slick, eh?” said Jim, whirling over to me and doing one of those skating carnival halts.

“How much are they?” I asked.

“I didn’t ask,” said Jim, and we looked for our young man, who, in the true spirit of Christmas, was already waiting on somebody else, letting us soak, as it were, on our skates.

“I think I’ll get a pair,” said Jim.

“I’d imagine they’re pretty high,” I said, “Did you ever feel anything so smooth?”

Watching for a Break

Holding each other, we took a couple of slides along the counter. We came to the main aisle. Jim was being a little too expert and his weight carried us out into the driving storm of doggedly moving humanity.

“Hey,” I said, missing my grab for the counter. “Hey.”

But how was anybody to know we were on wheels? We held fast to each other, as the thick, packed throng moved us pleasantly away, waiting for an opening or else a chance to seize hold of a pillar.

We had become involved, however, in one of those solid swarms that slowly shuffle, hour by hour, through the great stores these final festive days, and, since we were so tightly packed neither Jim nor I could stoop down to undo the skates from our feet, and since it would have been ridiculous to try to explain to the uninterested people pushing from behind or leaning back against us in front, we just let matters ride, until we got a break.

“Don’t struggle,” warned Jim quietly. “If we upset, we might start some kind of a panic. Take it easy.”

We took it easy. The ones behind shoved, the ones ahead laid back, and there, as snug as steers in a cattle car, we moved effortlessly along.

“Jim,” I confided, “this is an idea. I bet we could sell this idea to the big stores. Roller skates for rent, to make Christmas shopping easy.”

We rolled once around the sporting goods and twice around the toys. A couple of times, I thought I saw the chance to climb over small children and get a grip on a counter edge, but Jim’s grasp on my sleeve prevented me.

“Jim,” I said, “try to signal that young brat that is waiting on us.”

But the tide set out to sea and we started leaving the sporting goods.

“Jim,” I muttered, “turn your toes a little to the right, and try to steer us to the side. We’re getting out of the sporting goods into the hardware.”

We both turned our toes right, but it made no difference. We were just lightly and easily rolled along, at the pace of the throng.

“One thing,” said Jim, “we can’t fall down and be trampled to death.”

“Hardware passing,” I said. “Linoleums next.”

We slowly rolled through the linoleums, past the coconut matting into the hooked rugs.

“Watch for a break,” I advised, “and see if you can make a grab. Once we get out of the crowd, we can fall down and take them off.”

But through the hooked rugs we slowly floated, and suddenly a dreadful presentiment assailed me.

“Pssst,” I hissed, “the escalator!”

“I’m afraid,” said Jim, “we’re for it.”

We could hear the dull rumble of the escalator. We tried to thrust out of the throng, but with nothing to grip with but our hands, all we succeeded in doing was irritating people whose arms we clutched, and they glared at us haughtily. Slowly the throng thickened, packed, pressed together and leaned hard over, in the general determination to get to the escalator. It was hopeless. When your turn comes to the escalator, you take it, willy nilly. We took ours.

Clinging to the fat rubber rails, we kept upright. I tried to raise one leg in order to unfasten one of the skates, but my knee bunted the lady ahead of me in an undignified fashion and she turned and hissed–

“Don’t get fresh!”

So, swiftly, inevitably, we reached the bottom of the escalator without having any time to plan or organize our arrival. And on the shining steel plate which bottoms all escalators our feet rolled forth and our helpless hands had to let go the fat rolling rubber railing and, ingloriously we skidded forth before the astonished eyes of the attendant and such shoppers as had enough interest left in life to bother looking.

The attendant helped us take the skates off. He did not, as I suggested to him, suppose we were trying to steal the skates.

“Not a tall, not a tall,” he assured us. “Things like this are happening all the time during the Christmas rush.”

So we took the skates slowly back to the young temporary salesman, who had not noticed our absence, and told him we would think the matter over.

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Editor’s Notes: This story serves as a reminder to anyone who bemoans that Christmas has become commercialized. Long before Charlie Brown complained about the commercialization of Christmas in 1965, people were complaining about it even earlier.

Old roller skates were metal and had to be strapped to your shoes. Since “one size fits all”, you needed a skate “key” to adjust the length to fit to your feet, and tighten and lock it.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 8, 1934

“How,” asked Jimmie Frise, “do little short men like you manage to do your Christmas shopping? How do you catch the attention of the salesgirls?”

“As a matter of fact, Jim,” I replied, “you have touched on a very sore spot. We small people don’t talk much about our size. It’s a sensitive subject. And I may say we all observe the approach of Christmas with a good deal of misgiving. It is strenuous enough pushing and shoving your way through the stores even if you are six feet tall and weigh 200 pounds. But when you are handicapped!”

“We ought to get the stores to advertise,” said Jim, ” ‘Small people do your Christmas shopping early.'”

“Better still,” I enthused, “let us ask the big stores to set aside a certain week, in the month before Christmas, as small people’s week. It would be a swell idea.”

“Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” said Jim, “would be ‘small folks’ days’ and the doormen at the entrances of the stores would respectfully stop all large people from coming in.”

“And Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays,” I finished, “would be large people’s week.”

“And the doormen,” reminded Jimmie, “would respectfully stop all small people from going in on those days, so as not to be a nuisance to the large people by getting tangled up in their feet all the time and stumbling over them.”

“Well, I hardly think that is a polite way of saying it, Jimmie,” I protested. “But the idea is a dandy. We ought to take it up with the big stores right away.”

“I’d hate to be short,” said Jim.

“It has its advantages,” I demurred. “For example, in sleeping car berths. And in wars. Small people are usually quicker than big people. They are handier around the house, too. A great big man must be terrible bother around a house, lumbering around and making everything creak and wearing out the furniture.”

“You take elevators,” I said. “I hate getting into a crowded elevator. It is the most undignifying thing in the world. For one thing, nobody makes room for a small man. Yet when a big man comes charging at crowded elevator, everybody moves over, with uneasy little smiles, like patting a big dog, and squeezes to make room for him. Sometimes, I try to get in an elevator first, to get a good place. But sure as fate, some great big man gets in after me, turns his back and pushes his large anatomy right into my face. If I wait, to escape that indignity, I have to wiggle and squash to try to get in at all.”

“I never noticed those things,” said Jim. “After this, I will try to stand edgeways to any little men in the elevator.”

“And street cars,” I continued. “One reason I have worked and toiled in this world to make money was to own a car so that I would never, never have to ride in street cars. The way they shove you aside as you try to get aboard. The way they push and shove you, once you are in. I have had tall men rest their evening papers on my hat. I have had tall girls rest their elbows on my shoulder. Too lazy to hold on to the strap or rail above them, these big people just sag in the crowd, and let their swaying and lurching be taken up by the lesser people. And, naturally, by the law of ultimate consumption, it is us smallest people who take up the slack.”

“You move me deeply,” said Jim. “I had no idea.”

“I don’t like sport,” I said, “because big men stand up in front of me at the crucial moments of the rugby or hockey game. I may say I never saw a goal scored in my life.”

“Mercy,” said Jim.

“Motor cars are all made for big men,” I declared. “Golf sticks, telephone booths, mirrors in hotel bathrooms, counters in lunch rooms, are all made for big men. There are stand-up restaurants in Toronto, over which just my head shows. I wouldn’t eat there for a thousand dollars. Seats everywhere, seats in street cars, hotels, church, are all made for big men, so that my feet dangle in the air. I don’t go to church. If I try to buy a ready-made coat, and have it shortened in the tail so that my feet show, the pockets are slung so low down I have to bend to reach them.”

“The advantages in this life,” said Jim, “are all on the side of the tall people.”

“Agreed,” I admitted bitterly. “A big man is showered with respect and honor wherever he goes. He gets waited on immediately in stores and restaurants. He has his path cleared for him wherever he goes. The world pays respect and honor to big men, no matter who or what they are. Whereas a little man has to conquer the world, like Napoleon, before he can win the world’s respect.”

“And not always then,” put in Jim. “But what are you going to do about Christmas? Why not just do your shopping early? You small people know your own difficulties. Why don’t you act on that knowledge?”

“Because I don’t think it is fair,” I stated. “Because I have my rights, just the same as any two hundred pounder. Because I have as much right to be waited on in a store as any policeman in captivity!”

“Why don’t you use stilts?” asked Jim. “Just make a pair of stilts that would lift you up to about seven feet tall. I bet you would have no trouble doing your Christmas shopping then.”

“Jim,” I gasped, “what a peach of an idea …”

The Secret of Success

“The only trouble would be carrying your parcels on stilts,” said Jim.

“I could have everything sent,” I said, “All I would do would be to carry my stilts until I got to the department where I wanted to buy something. Then up on my stilts, make my purchase and then dismount. I wouldn’t even have to pay money. Just have the stuff sent c.o.d.”

“You certainly could see what was on sale,” admitted Jim. “One of my troubles is seeing what is for sale.”

“I’m going to patent this idea,” I cried, “and then sell it to the big stores. They could have a department near the main entrance, the stilt department, where stilts would be hired out for a normal sum to all short people. They could then hobble about the store, making their purchases as easily as anybody.”

“That would lose you the whole advantage,” argued Jim. “The first thing you know, big people would get tired of being crowded out by little people on stilts and then they would begin using stilts, and where would you be? No, sir. Use the stilts yourself and see how it works. In this life grab every advantage you can think of. That’s the secret of success.”

Jim assisted me in making the stilts in my cellar. We used seven-foot lengths of what the timber dealers call two by two. Three feet from the ground we nailed on two cleats for my feet to rest on. When we got them done that far I mounted the stilts and wobbled around the cellar.

“Hooray,” cheered Jim. “They’re perfect. And you’re a natural born stiltsman.”

It was exciting. We then put some fancy trimmings on them, such as pieces of rubber from an old tire, on the bottoms, and we put linings of more rubber on the cleats so that my feet would not slip when I was “up.” as they say in the racing world. I gave them a nice coat of varnish and set them to dry.

“I’ll come shopping with you,” assured Jimmie, “in case you want any of your parcels carried.”

“You’re the sort of partner,” I thanked him heartily.

I went home early two afternoons and did some practice on the stilts. By taking several small boys along with me I pretended I was showing them the fun of stilts. And by letting all of them try the stilts I was able to work in a lot of showing-how, which gave me plenty of practice until I became, if I may say so, quite handy.

We chose Friday afternoon for the shopping day.

“Make it the most crowded time of all,” said Jim. “It will be a real test of your genius.”

When we arrived at the main entrance of the big store, I carrying the stilts and nobody paying any more attention to me than if it were an umbrella I was carrying. Jim drew me aside.

“Look,” he said, “are you really going ahead with this stunt?”

I was amazed.

“Because,” said Jimmie, “people will think you are nuts.”

“Jimmie,” I retorted, “during these three weeks everybody thinks everybody is nuts. This is Christmas month. Anything goes.”

“Well, I warn you,” he sighed.

But he came with me. We walked through the soaps and the magazines. We passed the purses. We drew near the jewelry, I carrying the stilts at what soldiers call the high-port.

Invention of the Ages

“What are you going to get first?” asked Jim.

“Three pair of silk stockings,” I said, “in a gift box.”

The stockings counter was just a midway. Just a veterans’ reunion. Just a fight. Women were three and four deep around the counters, they were wedged one in beside another and, standing on the floor, I could not see the top of even a tall salesgirl.

“Now, Jim,” said I, “let me show you something.”

Standing well back from the melee, I mounted the stilts. With the skill of an old hand I waddled forward toward the stockings counter. Now I could see right over the heads of four rows of ladies, and up into my face stared not one but eight or nine salesgirls. Their expressions were wide-eyed and delighted. In an instant that tired Friday afternoon look vanished. Life became interesting to them once more.

I waddled down the counter, looking at the piles of stockings with the prices set in cards above them. Three of the girls left their customers and followed me anxiously.

“How much are those with the frilly top?” I asked.

“Eighty-nine cents,” said all three girls.

“May I have three pairs, please? Send them c.o.d. and in a gift box,” said I giving them my address.

Forty or fifty indignant female customers were by now glaring angrily up at me. Up, I say, and I mean up. I now realize the feeling a tall man must have in a theatre line-up or in a crowded elevator. It is a swell feeling. I felt like thanking Heaven.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl who had got her book open first.

“Thank you,” said I dropping easily off the stilts and resting them on my shoulder like a skier.

Jimmie, who had been concealing himself behind a pillar, came out sheepishly.

“Well I never,” said he.

“Jim,” I cried, “it’s the invention of the ages. I never in my life shopped so quickly or was treated so politely. You can have no idea of the power, the authority, the ease it gives you to be standing looking down on everybody. Especially a mob of indignant women.”

“I imagined you’d be mobbed,” said Jim.

“Now for the toy department,” said I.

We went up the elevator to the toys. Such a pandemonium you never saw. Dolls were my first concern, so I mounted my stilts in the rear of the mob in front of the doll counter. Most of the crowd thought I was one of the clowns hired to wander about the toy floor, and they laughed merrily while I waded in and gave my order for a nice fat doll. It didn’t take one minute to complete the deal. Then I hopped down and rejoined Jim.

“Try it, Jim,” I begged him. “Get up on them and try them.”

“I can see all right,” replied he.

“Now for ladies’ gloves,” said I.

“Main floor.”

The congestion was terrific.

“You’ll come to grief here,” said Jim. “Better wait until early to-morrow morning and order your gloves from the ground level.”

“I know the color, the size and the price I want,” I retorted. “Just stand aside watch.”

I mounted. I moved through the crowd. Two or three ladies elbowed my legs as I passed them. But as usual the salesgirls, seeing me towering above the throng, greeted me with sudden bright and interested glances.

“So,” I thought to myself, “this is the eye the tall boys get, is it?”

Speaking in a deep voice that fitted my height, I ordered the kind of gloves I wanted, the girl held them up for me to see, and I was in the act of leaning slightly forward to look at the quality of the leather when one of those boys they hire only for the Christmas rush, shoving one of those large boxes on wheels which you never see except during the worst of the Christmas rush, came from behind and pushed the box between my stilts.

Naturally it was impossible to foresee such a contingency. Not knowing what was spreading the stilts, I dropped off backward and fell into the parcel wagon the boy was shoving. There were a number of parcels in the little wagon, but not enough to prevent me falling deep into it. The boy, being a new boy and anxious to hold his job, kept right on pushing through the crowd, while Jimmie, appearing beside the wagon, said to the boy:

“Go right ahead, boy, deliver him.”

And over by the south elevators, where the crowd was not so thick, Jim helped me out.

“Get my stilts,” I insisted. “I’m not through.”

“You’re through,” said Jim, handing the boy a quarter.

“Did you, by any chance,” I asked icily “pay that boy to upset me?”

“I would spend far more than a quarter for an old friend,” said Jim.

“You’re jealous,” I cried, “You’re just jealous, because I was higher than you. Now I see through it all: you tall people are just childishly jealous of anybody taller than you.”

“You looked like a sap,” said Jim.

“Because you have always been used to looking down on me from a height,” I said. “Jim, I think this is mighty small of you.”

“Let us stay the way the Lord made us,” said Jim. “The expression on your face, up there on those stilts, was ridiculous. You thought you were a duke or something.”

“Jim, I felt good,” I admitted.

“It takes years,” ended Jim, “to grow the way we are. A sudden change ruins us. If you keep your feet on the ground I’ll help you with your Christmas shopping. I’ll come along and lift you up so you can see what’s on the counters.”

“Very good,” said I. But the pavement seemed stiflingly close.

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Editor’s Notes: Buying something c.o.d., meant “Cash on Delivery”. The store would sent the item to your home, and you would pay full price on receipt.