‘Tis the Season to be Surly

Tis the Season to be Surly HAROLD O. J. BROWN

The cheerful sights and sounds of Christmas this year once again are mingled with a number of peevish outbursts. The Christmas season gladdens the heart of the genuinely Christian, of the merely sentimental, and of the merely commercial man, but there are some who are plunged by it into gloom and exasperation. It is natural that Christmas should be dear to the Christian as one of the two great commemorative festivals of his faith. The merely sentimentally-in- clined individual finds if anything more nourishment in the annual American Christmas than does the religious man; for the man of com- merce, of course, it is the great feast, not merely one of two great ones. But for those frigid souls who cannot re- joice either in the great miracle which Christmas celebrates, or in the less Christianly motivated but genuine exchange of gifts and greet- ings, or in the annual transfusion of hoarded or borrowed money into the consumer market, ’tis the season to be surly.

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Harold O. J. Brown

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Tis the Season to be Surly HAROLD O. J. BROWN

The cheerful sights and sounds of Christmas this year once again are mingled with a number of peevish outbursts. The Christmas season gladdens the heart of the genuinely Christian, of the merely sentimental, and of the merely commercial man, but there are some who are plunged by it into gloom and exasperation. It is natural that Christmas should be dear to the Christian as one of the two great commemorative festivals of his faith. The merely sentimentally-in- clined individual finds if anything more nourishment in the annual American Christmas than does the religious man; for the man of com- merce, of course, it is the great feast, not merely one of two great ones. But for those frigid souls who cannot re- joice either in the great miracle which Christmas celebrates, or in the less Christianly motivated but genuine exchange of gifts and greet- ings, or in the annual transfusion of hoarded or borrowed money into the consumer market, ’tis the season to be surly.