PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2130, 20 December 1894, Page 33

PASSING NOTES.

Nothing but our insatiable appetite for holidays saves from extinction the " Merry Christmas "of onr forefathers. All the oldworld associations of the season are perishing. The carols, the waits, the holly and mittletoe, Santa Clans, and the " Christmas box" make some Bhow of lingering, half ashamed of themselves, but they are bound to go in the end ; a New Zealand Christmas will soon be as ignorant of these as of

The yule-clog sparkling keen with frost;, the icicles at the eaves, and the landscape folded deep in snow. Home gatherings have become home scatterings. Everybody gets out of town who can ; the girls are at the seaside, the boys are shooting, fishing, camping out; everywhere the schoolmaster is abroad — cheap - tripping to Australia or on a walking tour among the lakes and mountains ; young New Zealand, released from his salutary control, returne to Nature and runs wild in woods. It is the climate; OhrUtinaa at midsummer is unthinkable; nobody can drink spiced drinks and digest heavy pudding with the thermometer at 90 in the shade There remains, nevertheless, the possibility of beiDg merry on the due date notwithstanding the changed cirenmstancts, and to be merry at this season rises to the rank of a moral duty. Let us renounce politics, forget the baleful existenoo of Seddon and Co., refuse to renwmber the profioiency of our staple produots in the art of funking, dismiss all thought of tradesmen's bills, and begin to be merry I It will help if we provide ourselves with the Ohrietmaß number of the Witness. For my own part, as in former years so now, with that spirit of charity proper to the season, I forgive all th« people I have Injured, and call upon all and sundry to make for themselves a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

It is impossible to feel any keen interest in the progress of the Chinese Japanese war. The very names of the combatants are against it. Somebody has been trying to put this war into poetry, with results like the following:—

There were Li Hung Chung Ami Xi Wun Lung And bold Che« Gin Choo Cham, With Ch-me Wour Ching, And Sam Mov Sing And fierce Wah Wee woo Warn.