Mince Pie

Christmas Cards

By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock

of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and

10's were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to

rub them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers

design us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to

the time we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of

meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they

were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so

inadequate to the festival.

This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance

and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists have

nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide convention.

After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we have found

not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of the true

romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies around

us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs in

snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what has a

blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug of

mulled claret. Now these things are merry enough in their way, or they

were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in

Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and

circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled

in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?

Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket

of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and

holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? Root beer may be but meager

flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate 'tis honest, 'tis

actual, 'tis tangible and potable. And where, among all the Christmas

cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing of all our

triumphs? Where is the stately apartment house, looming like Gibraltar

against a sunset sky? Must we, even at Christmas time, fool ourselves

with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is around

us?

It is said that man's material achievements have outrun his imagination;

that poets and painters are too puny to grapple with the world as it

is. Certainly a visitor from another sphere, looking on our fantastic

and exciting civilization, would find little reflection of it in the

Christmas card. He would find us clinging desperately to what we have

been taught to believe was picturesque and jolly, and afraid to assert

that the things of to-day are comely too. Even on the basis of

discomfort (an acknowledged criterion of picturesqueness) surely a

trolley car jammed with parcel-laden passengers is just as satisfying a

spectacle as any stage coach? Surely the steam radiator, if not so

lovely as a flame-gilded hearth, is more real to most of us? And instead

of the customary picture of shivering subjects of George III held up by

a highwayman on Hampstead Heath, why not a deftly delineated sketch of

victims in a steam-heated lobby submitting to the plunder of the

hat-check bandit? Come, let us be honest! The romance of to-day is as

good as any!

Many must have felt this same uneasiness in trying to find Christmas

cards that would really say something of what is in their hearts. The

sentiment behind the card is as lovely and as true as ever, but the

cards themselves are outmoded bottles for the new wine. It seems a cruel

thing to say, but we are impatient with the mottoes and pictures we see

in the shops because they are a conventional echo of a beauty that is

past. What could be more absurd than to send to a friend in a city

apartment a rhyme such as this: