CHRISTMAS CROWDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 305, 24 December 1926, Page 8

CHRISTMAS CROWDS.

WHERE DO THEY COME FROM? THE ROOF-TREE TRADITION. COMMUNITY'S SPENDING POWER. Has it ever struck you that there is something rather mysterious as to where all the people come from at Christmas? Everybody seems to flock into the city, and everybody seems to flock to the country, or at least to the various seaside and inland pleasure resorts. We can see for ourselves how the folk pour into the city, and one has only to try and get accommodation at any popular holiday resort during Christmas and Xew Year, to find out how full they are. Knowing these facts, one is naturally led to ask: "Are there any places anywhere that are not full?" Timber mills and similar concerns generally shut down for a couple of weeks at this time of the year, but there must be some other spots that are desorted, and the puzzle is where are they to be found? Is the solution that there is merely a re-shuffle of people? Do the country people come into town, and the town people, or a proportion of them, migrate to the country—a sort of exchange ? Possibly the answer is that most people still stick to the good old British fashion of homing for the kindly season, so closely associated with the hearthand the domestic affections. There are, of course, a certain number of people who have no ancestral home to which they can gravitate, and it is probably these unattached ones who swell the city ranks. Having no incentive to seek out the old homestead to form one in the great annual foregathering of the family, scattered during the rest of the year from north to south, these freelances would naturally drift towards the merriest spot where they can pursue their lonely, and inevitably rather self-centred pleasures, envying, if the truth were known, their more fortunate friends who have family ties. Auckland does not seem quite so full of people this Christmas as it was last year, but it is very difficult to speak with any certainty on this point. Shopkeepers generally, although, of course, there are many exceptions, say that less money is being spent. this year. For some time it has been apparent there was not so much ready money about, and this was bound to specially affect the Christmas trade, which is mostly a matter of sentiment, and not one of necessity. However, no one could go down Queen Street, or along Karangahape Road and say there were any signs of poverty. When we call such a Christmas as we are now having a moderately satisfactory one from the shopkeeper's point of view, we begin to realise to what a state of affluence we gradually got accustomed in recent years. When butter soared to boom prices and wool ,, followed, there was "money to burn." Some people thought that state of things had come to stay, and the process of deflation struck some of them pretty hard, but it had-to come, and the only thing to do was to face it philosophically. And when we hear that Christmas, 1926, is not quite so good from a spending point" of view as some of its recent predecessors, there 'is no need for pessimism. There is plenty of money in the land, in fact, judged by standards that prevailed fifteen years ago, we are more than affluent. All we need to do now is to adopt a commonsense outlook and remember that thrift is still a very necessary virtue.