Life — December 2, 1920 — page 58: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Bobby can’t wait to try his new sled as any man. For years and years every Christmas I have given fifty cents to the Protestant Infants’ Home and twenty-five cents to the Salvation Army, and in each “a friend,” without asking recognition or publicity for it. But the pace of philanthropy has become too swift. In my city, and in every other, there are “tags” and “drives” and “whirlwinds” every day. Only yesterday I was caught up in a Help-the-Homeless whirlwind that tore ten dollars out of me, and had hardly lit when I was struck right in the stomach by a Save-the-Children drive for fifty dollars. I have tags all over me as thick as meal tickets in a butcher’s shop. I have put my name down for instalments that reach beyond the grave. I am pledged to the support of Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, retired policemen, reformed drunkards, liberated convicts, invalided teachers and expatriated Armenians. The thing must stop. It has got to stop. In the good old days Mr, Rockefeller used to look after all this. What is he doing now? He did it, and I gave my twenty-five cents as a “friend.” Why can't we get back to that basis now? I ask him fairly, why? But even the redness and the whiteness are only part of it. What troubles me still more is the universal blueness. 1 never saw the papers so full of gloom. Sterling exchange keeps sinking. Gaso- line is rising. Wheat is shrinking. The coal is nearly all gone. There is hardly paper enough left to last out six more Sundays. The workers won't work. The thinkers can't think. The women are in revolt, and meantime the edeath rate, the Chrishuxs Lif birth rate, the poor rate and the tax rate ‘are simply ‘eating us up. With all this universal redness and whiteness and blueness around us, I must say things never looked so black. There is nothing for it, as I see it, but to move with the times and to be redder than the red, whiter than the white, and as blue as the bluest. In other words, to be a black-hearted, red-handed, blue- headed Bolshevik, and take a drive on one’s own account against the first princi- ples of civilization. But before I do this, I am willing to make the world at large an offer. Would it not be possible just for once, and for twenty-four hours, to restore to this pres- ent Christmas Day of 1920 something of the old pretences of the past? Let us hush the social unrest with the singing of the Doxology. Let us pretend, if it is only for twenty-four hours, that there are no troubles in the world, no strikes, no high cost of living, no Russians, no League of Nations. Let us hand round again to one another the good old presents that were the coin current of Christmas before the days of motor cars and luxury. Let us have our pockets full of knitted neckties and sticks of candy and ten-cent copies of Pilgrim’s Progress ready to give away. if the others will do this, I will. I will be right there on my doorstep waiting with dollars in my hand. My neighbor on his way to church may throw a playful snowball at me, and every infant that passes shall receive, I swear it, a stick of candy. Come, can’t we try it for once? Afterwards we can all raise hob again to our hearts’ content. “JACK dislocated his jaw at the foot- ball game.” “But I didn’t know that he played.” “He doesn't. He's one of the cheer leaders.” Crow: THEY MUST HAVE SANTA CLAUS THIS YEAR, I MIM LOOK SO PALE OVERWORKED NEVER SAW comicbooks.com