The Coming: Festival.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 49, 5 December 1901, Page 19

The Coming: Festival.

Here we are in December, only thre3 weeks away from Christmas. Christmas, lam able to inform you on good authority, ' comes but once a year.' At this expectant season children will tear themselves away from their lessons to dwell a little on the vieion of almonds and raisins, pluui-uake (they u 3 ed to call it more appropriately, plumb-cake), gooseberry wine, goose, pudding 1 , stomachache, and a variety of other blessings more or less in disguise which the thought of Christm is conjures up before their minds. And the 'grown-ups,' too, will have their day-dreams. Some will call to mind the Christmases of their childhood, when they gathered around the parental knee full of happiness and goose. Others, discarding the pleasures of memory, will give themseves over to devise the most miserable way of ' enjoying ' themselves daring the coming holidays. To those who cannot think of anything worse, I beg to suggest camping out. It is perfectly amazing to me, looking back upon my last escapade in this line, to recall the infinite variety of discomforti that may be associated with camping out, and in spite of them all, an otherwise sane man can succeed in convincing himself all the same that he is enjoying the thing. I spent a few days under canvas with a friend of mine last Easter. At home every FrHay b<* pprs ' thp blues' because the wife of his bosom won't let him stnff big in'ards with roast beef He would raise Cain of a morning if there happened to bo a lump in the porridge, and I've been him make his home resemble a Cheviot cob-house after the earthquake, simply because there were no frills on his pillow. Well, the week we were together in the tent it was really marvellous to witness the vim and energy of his attack upon tinned fish. Under a corrugated iron roof it would have Bet him crazy. Under & roof of canvas it was as nectar and ambrosia — food for the gods. And I couldn't for the life of me determine which was the more wonderful thin^ • to see him enjoying the porridge, which in color and consistency resembled Oamaru stone, or to hear him declare, with every appearance of sincerity, that he liked nothing better under his head at night than a rolled-up overcoat with a broken fence-post inside it. At home he would no more bleep on the ground floor than he would upon the damp floor of Lyttelton Harbour. Unier canvas he was as happy as a sandboy because the tent had no cellar — but if it had, he would have gone to sleep in the coldest corner of it.