THE WAIL AFTER CHRISTMAS

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 303, 23 December 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE WAIL AFTER CHRISTMAS

I DON'T want you to misunderstand me. I am not one of those miserable people who hate the sight of Christmas so much that they make a practice of retiring to the coal cellar to escape the happy laughter of the kids. Oh, dear me, no. But 1 am not going to pretend I am a Yuletide whole-hogger;'and, now that the subject has cropped up, I don't mind admitting that there are some things about Christmas that give me a pain in the neck. Take the case of Christmas cards. Now, frankly, I have not the slightest use for Christmas cards, and, if the Premier 'were doing his job, he would bring in a short Act of Parliament making senders of them liable to be transported for life. Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with Christmas cards in themselves. It is the nit-wits who send them that are responsive for all the trouble. Now, I do not tell everybody this, but for some time past I have been gradually losing my hair. Day by day it has been leaving me, tress by tress and lock by lock, and in spite of the most tender care there is now not enough of it left to make—as my nephew rather crudely remarked —a hair hearthrug for a flea's kitchen. It is a tragic moment in a man's life when he discovers he can get along without the help of a hairbrush, and .1 want you to bear this in mind while we . proceed to peruse the verse that was printed on the Christmas card I received from Fothergill, an idiot of a friend of mine: Greetings ! And just to wish you That, as the years you shed, Tour joys may be as many As the hairs upon your head.' Hardly the sort of thing you would expect from a friend, especially at Christmas. Can you wonder it has put me off Christmas cards for good. That'brings me to Christmas 4>ilddiiigs. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I dislike Christmas pudding. And it is not because I once accidentally swallowed the bachelor's button. It goes deeper than that. No sooner does the pudding appear on the table than I get a sort of sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and something in my subconscious mind warns that, unless I am looking for trouble, now is the time to retire. But I never do retire. For—and now we come to the reason why I both fear and loathe the stuff—Christmas padding exercises a horrible fascination over me and I simply cannot resist it. .Entirely disregarding the state of my appetite, I am reluctantly obliged to eat it—in f-ict,

By — John Robinson

to over-eat it. And when I crawl tmSiil from the table I am so utterly overecjj by the ordeal that I eollapsa into the - nearest easy chair and spend the isterial until supper in slumber. v ; No pudding that treats me like can hope for my respect. If in the latnn,>! owing to circumstances over which I hero no control, I am obliged to eat it, th» J? shall eat it. But nothing can ever mfe me like it. I shall go on hating it to tfe end. Another thing I cannot honestly in J care for is the Christmas cracker. Of course, it gives one a- cheery feeling to hear the things going off bang, and I mo* admit that they have supplied me in n» time with some very natty headgear. Btrt you cannot have a cracker without a motto, and that, in my opinion, is the manufacturers make their mistake. Last year at the Pilkington-Weblert I pulled a cracker with old Colonel Bunting, thorne, and, by taking a firm grip on the part that matters, I was successful in securing (a) one paper hat suitable for a pirate; (h) one jumping frog that emitted a croak under pressure; and (c) one motto, with floral border, that resdr as follows: — Somebody lovef you And longs for your kisses; So find the damsel And learn what true bliss is. Now you cannot read a verse like that unmoved, and you cannot afford to ignore it. Of course, one does not believe implicitly in cracker mottoes; but, on the other hand, it has never been definitely established that they are all fudge. Even if there was only a fifty-fifty chanc-e of this one being true, it seemed rather callous to ignore the possibility that some poor yew* girl was secretly crying her eyes out just because I had not the common humanity to trot round and find her. So I started on a tour of inspection. As far as I could see, there was only one damsel who was yearning for someb3dv'i kisses —all the rest were being kissed by somebody else —so I steered her across to an alcove and administered a salute on her lip salve. What happened afterwards I do not exactly renlember. Anyway, it turned out that she wan a physical training instructor at a seminary f6r young ladies, which accounted for the fact that she did not know her own strength. However, she fortunately knew something about first aid, so she was able to make quite a decent job of patching up my eye with a powder puff and a dab of rouge.

But it completely put me off Christmas crackers. Frankly, I consider the thin ire are dangerous.