Such a lot of things seem to be manufactured on purpose that people may perform a duty that is expected of them in the holidays.  The house is full of these impossible things; they occupy the mantelpieces, they stand about on the tottering little tables, they are ingenious, they are made for wants yet undiscovered, they tarnish, they break, they will not “work,” and pretty soon they look “second-hand.”  Yet there must be more satisfaction in giving these articles than in receiving them, and maybe a spice of malice—­not that of course, for in the holidays nearly every gift expresses at least kindly remembrance—­but if you give them you do not have to live with them.  But consider how full the world is of holiday goods—­costly goods too—­that are of no earthly use, and are not even artistic, and how short life is, and how many people actually need books and other indispensable articles, and how starved are many fine drawing-rooms, not for holiday goods, but for objects of beauty.

Christmas stands for much, and for more and more in a world that is breaking down its barriers of race and religious intolerance, and one of its chief offices has been supposed to be the teaching of men the pleasure there is in getting rid of some of their possessions for the benefit of others.  But this frittering away a good instinct and tendency in conventional giving of manufactures made to suit an artificial condition is hardly in the line of developing the spirit that shares the last crust or gives to the thirsty companion in the desert the first pull at the canteen.  Of course Christmas feeling is the life of trade and all that, and we will be the last to discourage any sort of giving, for one can scarcely disencumber himself of anything in his passage through this world and not be benefited; but the hint may not be thrown away that one will personally get more satisfaction out of his periodic or continual benevolence if he gives during his life the things which he wants and other people need, and reserves for a fine show in his will a collected but not selected mass of holiday goods.

CLIMATE AND HAPPINESS

The idea of the relation of climate to happiness is modern.  It is probably born of the telegraph and of the possibility of rapid travel, and it is more disturbing to serenity of mind than any other.  Providence had so ordered it that if we sat still in almost any region of the globe except the tropics we would have, in course of the year, almost all the kinds of climate that exist.  The ancient societies did not trouble themselves about the matter; they froze or thawed, were hot or cold, as it pleased the gods.  They did not think of fleeing from winter any more than from the summer solstice, and consequently they enjoyed a certain contentment of mind that is absent from modern life.  We are more intelligent, and therefore more discontented and unhappy.  We are always trying to escape winter when we are not