Thanksgiving once over, the pace quickens. Each church has its yearly sale and supper at hand, for which months of faithful work have been preparing, and these once worked off, the whole town, as I have said, loses its head in a perfect fever of giving. What does anything matter but happiness? Christmas is coming! Every man, woman, and child is a hurrying Santa Claus. The first snow brings its strange hush, its strange sheltering pureness, and the sleigh-bells begin once more to jingle all about. During Christmas week hundreds of strings of colored lights are hung across the business streets. Wreaths and garlands of fragrant balsam fir, the very breath and expression of our countryside, are hung everywhere, over shop windows and doorways, in every house window, and on quiet mounds in the churchyard and cemetery. The solemnity of the great festival, which is our Christmas, our All Saints’ and All Souls’ in one, folds round us.
The churches are all dark and sweet, like rich nests, with their heavy fir garlands, lit up by candles. Pews that may be scantily filled at most times are crowded to-night, for here are the boys and girls, thronging home from business and college. Here are the three tall boys of one household, whom we have not seen for a long time, and there are four others. Here are girls home from boarding-school, rosy and sweet, blossomed into full maidenhood, bringing a whiff of the city in their furs and well-cut frocks. There is the only son of one family, who left home a stripling, now back for the first time, a stalwart man, with his young wife and three children. His little mother cannot see plainly, through her happy tears; and there, and there, and there again, are re-united households.
The bells ring out, and after them comes the silver sound of the first hymn.
Of late, on Christmas evening, the choirs of the different churches have begun the custom of meeting on the Common, to lead the crowd in hymns, round the town Christmas Tree. Later they separate and go about singing to different invalids and shut-ins, and many of the houses are lighted up.
So, within doors, we neighbors meet in reverent and thankful worship; while without, the pure snow, the grave trees, the stars, bear their enduring witness to that of which they, and we and our human worship, are a part.