Christmas in My Heart

by Joe Wheeler

  I looked in my mailbox. There were only bills in it, a sheaf of them, and two white envelopes which I was sure contained more bills. I went up three dusty flights of stairs, and I cried, shivering in my thin coat. But I made myself smile so I could greet my little daughter with a pretense of happiness. She opened the door for me and threw herself in my arms, screaming joyously and demanding that we decorate the tree immediately.

  Peggy was not yet 6 years old, and had been alone all day while I worked. She had set our kitchen table for our evening meal, proudly, and put pans out and the three cans of food which would be our dinner. For some reason, when I looked at those pans and cans, I felt brokenhearted. We would have only hamburgers for our Christmas dinner tomorrow, and gelatin. I stood in the cold little kitchen, and misery overwhelmed me. For the first time in my life, I doubted the existence of God and His mercy, and the coldness in my heart was colder than ice.

  The doorbell rang, and Peggy ran fleetly to answer it, calling that it must be Santa Claus. Then I heard a man talking heartily to her and went to the door. He was a delivery man, and his arms were full of big parcels, and he was laughing at my child’s frenzied joy and her dancing. “This is a mistake,” I said, but he read the name on the parcels, and they were for me. When he had gone I could only stare at the boxes. Peggy and I sat on the floor and opened them. A huge doll, three times the size of the one I had bought for her. Gloves. Candy. A beautiful leather purse. Incredible! I looked for the name of the sender. It was the teacher, the address simply “California,” where she had moved.

  Our dinner that night was the most delicious I had ever eaten. I could only pray in myself, “Thank you, Father.” I forgot I had no money for the rent and only $15 in my purse and no job. My child and I ate and laughed together in happiness. Then we decorated the little tree and marveled at it. I put Peggy to bed and set up her gifts around the tree, and a sweet peace flooded me like a benediction. I had some hope again. I could even examine the sheaf of bills without cringing. Then I opened the two white envelopes. One contained a check for $30 from a company I had worked for briefly in the summer. It was, said a note, my “Christmas bonus.” My rent!

  The other envelope was an offer of a permanent position with the government—to begin two days after Christmas. I sat with the letter in my hand and the check on the table before me, and I think that was the most joyful moment of my life up to that time.

  The church bells began to ring. I hurriedly looked at my child, who was sleeping blissfully, and ran down to the street. Everywhere people were walking to church to celebrate the birth of the Savior. People smiled at me and I smiled back. The storm had stopped, the sky was pure and glittering with stars.

  “The Lord is born!” sang the bells to the crystal night and the laughing darkness. Someone began to sing, “Come, all ye faithful!” I joined in and sang with the strangers all about me.

  I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all.

  And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.

  A Day of

  Pleasant Bread

  DAVID GRAYSON

  When Christmas nears, our thoughts often turn to those less fortunate than we—the poor, the needy, the destitute. But what if there are none in that condition nearby? If so, would one then—perish the thought!—have to resort to inviting the rich?

  (Pulitzer Prize winning author Ray Stannard Baker [1870–1946] led a double life. In public he was the renowned editor, journalist, and author of the monumental eight-volume life of Woodrow Wilson. In private, under the pen name of David Grayson, he was free to roam the country as a homespun philosopher and humorist. In the process, we are all the richer for such books as Adventures in Contentment, Adventures in Friendship, The Friendly Road, Great Possessions, and Adventures in Understanding.)

  They have all gone now, and the house is very still. For the first time this evening I can hear the familiar sound of the December wind blustering about the house, complaining at closed doorways, asking questions at the shutters; but here in my room, under the green reading lamp, it is warm and still. Although Harriet has closed the doors, covered the coals in the fireplace, and said goodnight, the atmosphere still seems to tingle with the electricity of genial humanity.

  The parting voice of the Scotch preacher still booms in my ears:

  “This,” said he, as he was going out of our door, wrapped like an Arctic highlander in cloaks and tippets, “has been a day of pleasant bread.”

  One of the very pleasantest I can remember!

  I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays—let them overtake me unexpectedly—waking up some fine morning and suddenly saying to myself:

  “Why, this is Christmas Day!”

  How the discovery makes one bound out of his bed! What a new sense of life and adventure it imparts! Almost anything may happen on a day like this—one thinks. I may meet friends I have not seen before in years. Who knows? I may discover that this is a far better and kindlier world than I had ever dreamed it could be.

  So I sing out to Harriet as I go down:

  “Merry Christmas, Harriet”—and not waiting for her sleepy reply, I go down and build the biggest, warmest, friendliest fire of the year. Then I get into my thick coat and mittens and open the back door. All around the sill, deep on the step, and all about the yard lies the drifted snow: it has transformed my wood pile into a grotesque Indian mound, and it frosts the roof of my barn like a wedding cake. I go at it lustily with my wooden shovel, clearing out a pathway to the gate.…

  All the morning as I went about my chores I had a peculiar sense of expected pleasure. It seemed certain to me that something unusual and adventurous was about to happen—and if it did not happen offhand, why, I was there to make it happen! When I went in to breakfast (do you know the fragrance of broiling bacon when you have worked for an hour before breakfast on a morning of zero weather? If you do not, consider that heaven still has gifts in store for you!)—when I went in to breakfast, I fancied that Harriet looked preoccupied, but I was too busy just then (hot corn muffins) to make an inquiry, and I knew by experience that the best solvent of secrecy is patience.

  “David,” said Harriet presently, “the cousins can’t come!”

  “Can’t come!” I exclaimed.

  “Why, you act as if you were delighted.”

  “No—well, yes,” I said. “I knew that some extraordinary adventure was about to happen!”

  “Adventure! It’s a cruel disappointment—I was all ready for them.”

  “Harriet,” I said, “adventure is just what we make it. And aren’t we to have the Scotch preacher and his wife?”

  “But I’ve got such a good dinner.”

  “Well,” I said, “there are no two ways about it: it must be eaten! You may depend upon me to do my duty.”

  “We’ll have to send out into the highways and compel them to come in,” said Harriet ruefully.

  I had several choice observations I should have liked to make upon this problem, but Harriet was plainly not listening; she sat with her eyes fixed reflectively on the coffeepot. I watched her for a moment, then I remarked:

  “There aren’t any.”

  “David,” she exclaimed, “how did you know what I was thinking about?”

  “I merely wanted to show you,” I said, “that my genius is not properly appreciated in my own household. You thought of highways, didn’t you? Then you thought of the poor; especially the poor on Christmas Day; then of Mrs. Heney, who isn’t poor anymore, having married John Daniels; and then I said ‘There aren’t any.’ ”

  Harriet laughed.

  “It has come to a pretty pass,” she said, “when
there are no poor people to invite to dinner on Christmas Day.”

  “It’s a tragedy, I’ll admit,” I said, “but let’s be logical about it.”

  “I am willing,” said Harriet, “to be as logical as you like.”

  “Then,” I said, “having no poor to invite to dinner, we must necessarily try the rich. That’s logical, isn’t it?”

  “Who?” asked Harriet, which is just like a woman. Whenever you get a good healthy argument started with her, she will suddenly short-circuit it, and want to know if you mean Mr. Smith, or Joe Perkins’s boys, which I maintain is not logical.

  “Well, there are the Starkweathers,” I said.

  “David!”

  “They’re rich, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but you know how they live—what dinners they have—and besides, they probably have a houseful of company.”

  “Weren’t you telling me the other day how many people who were really suffering were too proud to let anyone know about it? Weren’t you advising the necessity of getting acquainted with people and finding out—tactfully, of course—you made a point of fact—what the trouble was?”

  “But I was talking of poor people.”

  “Why shouldn’t a rule that is good for poor people be equally as good for rich people? Aren’t they proud?”

  “Oh, you can argue,” observed Harriet.

  “And I can act, too,” I said. “I am now going over to invite the Starkweathers. I heard a rumor that their cook has left them, and I expect to find them starving in their parlor. Of course they’ll be very haughty and proud, but I’ll be tactful, and when I go away I’ll casually leave a diamond tiara in the front hall.”

  “What is the matter with you this morning?”

  “Christmas,” I said.

  I can’t tell how pleased I was with the enterprise I had in mind: it suggested all sort of amusing and surprising developments. Moreover, I left Harriet, finally, in the breeziest of spirits, having quite forgotten her disappointment over the nonarrival of the cousins.

  “If you should get the Starkweathers—”

  “ ‘In the bright lexicon of youth,’ ” I observed, “ ‘there is no such word as fail.’ ”

  So I set off up the town road. A team or two had already been that way and had broken a track through the snow. The sun was now fully up, but the air still tingled with the electricity of zero weather. And the fields! I have seen the fields of June and the fields of October, but I think I never saw our countryside, hills and valleys, tree spaces and brook bottoms, more enchantingly beautiful than it was this morning. Snow everywhere—the fences half hidden, the bridges clogged, the trees laden: where the road was hard it squeaked under my feet, and where it was soft I strode through the drifts. And the air went to one’s head like wine!

  So I tramped past the Pattersons’. The old man, a grumpy old fellow, was going to the barn with a pail on his arm.

  “Merry Christmas,” I shouted.

  He looked around at me wonderingly and did not reply. At the corners I met the Newton boys so wrapped in tippets that I could see only their eyes and the red ends of their small noses. I passed the Williams’s house, where there was a cheerful smoke in the chimney and in the window a green wreath with a lively red bow. And I thought how happy everyone must be on a Christmas morning like this! At the hill bridge whom should I meet but the Scotch preacher himself, God bless him!

  “Well, well, David,” he exclaimed heartily, “Merry Christmas.”

  I drew my face down and said solemnly:

  “Dr. McAlway, I am on a most serious errand.”

  “Why, now what’s the matter?” He was all sympathy at once.

  “I am out in the highways trying to compel the poor of this neighborhood to come to our feast.”

  The Scotch preacher observed me with a twinkle in his eye.

  “David,” he said, putting his hand to his mouth as if to speak in my ear, “there is a poor man you will na’ have to compel.”

  “Oh, you don’t count,” I said. “You’re coming anyhow.”

  Then I told him of the errand with our millionaire friends, into the spirit of which he entered with the greatest zest. He was full of advice and much excited lest I fail to do a thoroughly competent job. For a moment I think he wanted to take the whole thing out of my hands.

  “Man, man, it’s a lovely thing to do,” he exclaimed, “but I ha’ me doots—I ha’ me doots.”

  At parting he hesitated a moment, and with a serious face inquired:

  “Is it by any chance a goose?”

  “It is,” I said, “a goose—a big one.”

  He heaved a sigh of complete satisfaction. “You have comforted my mind,” he said, “with the joys of anticipation—a goose, a big goose.”

  So I left him and went onward toward the Starkweathers’. Presently I saw the great house standing among its wintry trees. There was smoke in the chimney but no other evidence of life. At the gate my spirits, which had been of the best all the morning, began to fail me. Though Harriet and I were well enough acquainted with the Starkweathers, yet at this late moment on Christmas morning it did seem rather a harebrained scheme to think of inviting them to dinner.

  “Never mind,” I said, “they’ll not be displeased to see me anyway.”

  I waited in the reception room, which was cold and felt damp. In the parlor beyond I could see the innumerable things of beauty—furniture, pictures, books, so very, very much of everything—with which the room was filled. I saw it now, as I had often seen it before, with a peculiar sense of weariness. How all these things, though beautiful enough in themselves, must clutter up a man’s life!

  Do you know, the more I look into life, the more things it seems to me I can successfully lack—and continue to grow happier. How many kinds of food I do not need, nor cooks to cook them, how much curious clothing nor tailors to make it, how many books that I never read, and pictures that are not worthwhile! The further I run, the more I feel like casting aside all such impedimenta—lest I fail to arrive at the far goal of my endeavor.

  I like to think of an old Japanese nobleman I once read about, who ornamented his house with a single vase at a time, living with it, absorbing its message of beauty, and when he tired of it, replacing it with another. I wonder if he had the right way, and we, with so many objects to hang on our walls, place on our shelves, drape on our chairs, and spread on our floors, have mistaken our course and placed our hearts upon the multiplicity rather than the quality of our possessions!

  Presently Mr. Starkweather appeared in the doorway. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and slippers; and somehow, for a bright morning like this, he seemed old, and worn, and cold.

  “Well, well, friend,” he said, “I’m glad to see you.”

  He said it as though he meant it.

  “Come into the library; it’s the only room in the whole house that is comfortably warm. You’ve no idea what a task it is to heat a place like this in really cold weather. No sooner do I find a man who can run my furnace then he goes off and leaves me.”

  “I can sympathize with you,” I said, “we often have trouble at our house with the man who builds the fires.”

  He looked around at me quizzically.

  “He lies too long in bed in the morning,” I said.

  By this time we had arrived at the library, where a bright fire was burning in the grate. It was a fine big room, with dark oak furnishings and books in cases along one wall, but this morning it had a disheveled and untidy look. On a little table at one side of the fireplace were the remains of a breakfast; at the other a number of wraps were thrown carelessly upon a chair. As I came in Mrs. Starkweather rose from her place, drawing a silk scarf around her shoulders. She is a robust, rather handsome woman, with many rings on her fingers, and a pair of glasses hanging to a little gold hook on her ample bosom; but this morning she, too, looked worried and old.

  “Oh, yes,” she said with a rueful laugh, “we’re beginning a merry Christmas, as y
ou see. Think of Christmas with no cook in the house!”

  I felt as if I had discovered a gold mine. Poor starving millionaires!

  But Mrs. Starkweather had not told the whole of her sorrowful story.

  “We had a company of friends invited for dinner today,” she said, “and our cook was ill—or said she was—and had to go. One of the maids went with her. The man who looks after the furnace disappeared on Friday, and the stableman has been drinking. We can’t very well leave the place without someone who is responsible in charge of it—and so here we are. Merry Christmas!”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Poor people!

  “You might,” I said, “apply for Mrs. Heney’s place.”

  “Who is Mrs. Heney?” asked Mrs. Starkweather.

  “You don’t mean to say that you never heard of Mrs. Heney!” I exclaimed. “Mrs. Heney, who is now Mrs. ‘Penny’ Daniels? You’ve missed one of our greatest celebrities.”

  With that, of course, I had to tell them about Mrs. Heney, who has for years performed a most important function in this community. Alone and unaided, she has been the poor whom we are supposed to have always with us. If it had not been for the devoted faithfulness of Mrs. Heney at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other times of the year, I suppose our Woman’s Aid Society and the King’s Daughters would have perished miserably of undistributed turkeys and tufted comforters. For years Mrs. Heney filled the place most acceptably. Curbing the natural outpourings of a rather jovial soul, she could upon occasion look as deserving of charity as any person that ever I met. But I pitied the little Heneys: it always comes hard on the children. For weeks after every Thanksgiving and Christmas they always wore a painfully stuffed and suffocated look. I only came to appreciate fully what a self-sacrificing public servant Mrs. Heney really was when I learned that she had taken the desperate alternative of marrying “Penny” Daniels.