A Summer Christmas

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 141, 18 December 1928, Page 19

A Summer Christmas

F the weather was right and the calendar wrong it was mid- t I winter, a few days ago. But everyone is hoping that the calendar was right and the weather wrong (as it certainty appeared to be), and that next week it will be midsummer. Yet though this is the hope, it is held with a half-hidden idea of disloyalty to Christmas—that the appropriate atmosphere for the ; t season is "midst snow and ice a banner with a strange device" or 1 words to that effect. Anyway there should be snow outside, mistletoe hanging from the ceiling, and goose and plum pudding and the good old Christmas even if we die for it. Instead we secretly hope \ that there will be sun outside and all the ice will be mixed with * cream or tinkling against a glass with a cherry that looks as bright fl as holly and tastes much better. And after dinner we can take f the requisite exercise—playing tennis or pulling a boat or pulling a V chair into the shade. 0 If this-is the programme we really need not disturb ourselves w with the thought that it is un-Christmaslike. Untraditional it may x be if we look back only to our cold-climate ancestry, with their V pagan rights added to the Christmas festival—their yule logs and A wassail arid other heathenish and heating things. But we should go 4 further back, right to the beginning of Christmas, and there we would 0 find a tradition that could be followed out of doors.: Christmas f „ comes to us from a land of clear skies, sunny days, and pastoral V scenes. The pastoral idea is the essence of Christmas,—-the shep- A herds and their flocks and the wonder of bright days and starlit 4 nights in the country. The Christmas that we hope this will be, (I then, can be kept out of doors as many thousands will keep it in $ "country-scenes, and the true Christmas tradition can thus be V honoured more faithfully than if the weather makes us revert to the A . wintry celebrations which our Norse ancestry instituted for their own & comfort. > y