CHEER UP!

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 305, 24 December 1924, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHEER UP!

To millions of small people Christmas will be just as thrilling as it always has been. They would not be at all impressed if they w.-re to hear these gloomy mental comparisons of their parents, and. j above all, of their grandparents. For the older people get the more do they be- [ lieve that the present show s a dreadful fallingolf from the past. This pessimistic privilege of age has always existed. | It is right that we should cherish the memories of our youth, but we ' should not cherish them at the ex- ! pense. so to speak, of the youth of j the younger gener- ! ation. In their own minds — whatever we may think — the younger generation are experiencing very much [ what we experienced. They. too, ] will look back regretfully up on their youth one day as upon a lime when things were better than they are. Hut surely the world cannot have been deteriorating from generation to generation since time immemorialV If so. the Garden of Eden must, indeed, have been all that we have been led to suppose! To-morrow, instead of regretting the Christmases of our youth—which I am sure were in reality bardlv ever at all like the pictures on Christmas cards—we try to feel like our children and our grandchildren will be feeling. Let us. at least, pretend that this Christmas is going to be as good as a ny Christmas ever was — and then, in all probability, pretence will become reality.