Daily Circulation, 1660. The Oamaru Mail. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1895.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XX, Issue 6439, 25 December 1895, Page 2

Daily Circulation, 1660. The Oamaru Mail. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1895.

The twenty-fifth of December, like the clown in a pantomime, has bobbed up serenely-with the regulation " Here we are again," and with a punctuality that is positively distressing to the unhappy journalist who finds in it a new and a unique trouble. It is easy enough for that harassed individual to simply wish his readers, in all sincerity and good-fellowship, a Merry Christmas and a Happy Kew Year, but deep in his inmost soul he has a sneaking conviction that such a course would be a dereliction of duty, a disingenuous dodging of that immutable journalistic creed which has it 3 beginning and its end in the conviction that originality is the only pathway to Elysium. This creed demands that year by year he shall write a " Chiistmas article " to embody the conventional greeting in unconventional terms. To his fellow scribes at Home the task of varying the terms of their Christmas greetings is a comparatively easy one. They have but to pillage the vast storehouse of a national literature and prescribe for their patients at will from a wide range of " Christmas preserves." But the colonial scribe who sets out on a voyage of discovery in this direction invariably gets promptly wrecked on the Antipodes. " Ring out wild bells to the wild sky" is bound to be the first thing he tries, and this leads him at once into troubles which are a fair sample of those he may expect if he persist in his futile effort to pour his new Christmas wine into old bottles—he will quickly get as mixed as our metaphor, for the literary traditions of Christmas run to frost and snow and yule logs and holly-berries and ignore " the long blue solemn hours serenely flowing" and the pulseless ocean of summer skies, which are our portion at the festive season of the year. It is time that this anachronistic sentiment of seasons was displaced. If we have not the traditional surroundings to which to fit our Christmas our problem must be " Not to fancy what were fair in life Provided it could be, —but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair." If the frost and the snow and the mistletoe and the holly and the countless traditions of our fathers' Christmas are not ours, we still have a heritage to which our seasons may be linked, not destitute of poetry or romance. There is a whole volume in the sombre eucalyptus, there are books in the untrodden bush, there are epics in the sullen rugged hills. The young green of the Christmas grain, the noonday standing still for heat, the torn surf on the yellow beach, and the illimitable sea singing its ceaseless sorrow, have all an individuality and a woith which make no mean setting for even a season rich with a heritage of nearly twenty centuries of celebration. We want the stories of our Christmases to be written—the stories of those men and women who are building the nation, those of a generation already well-nigh past. We want the stories of their " commonplace " lives, their'' common-place " loves and hatreds, their dogged perseverance and unceasing toil, their tears and smiles, their sorrows and their joys, their marryings and their buryings—all the grand, simple, sorrowful, monotony of their day-in-day-out existences. We want these stories redolent of the soil. We want some young colonial, born and bred here, steeped in the atmosphere of the country, to lay the foundation of this national literature. And when that day comes, as come it shortly will, we shall be able to put our Tennyson and our Browning side by side with the gentle Elia upon the topmost office shelf, and turning to the pages of our own history, send forth, in words which will strike a responsive chord in all Colonial hearts, and which will perhaps add a new and a deeper significance, the old greeting «• a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."