100 years ago this month, a magazine published an essay written by Booth Tarkington for a column called “I Remember a Christmas.” Booth Tarkington was an extremely popular author in his day who won two Pulitzer Prize for his works. Tarkington titled this particular essay, “The Christmas That Means Most.“
Looking ahead
When we were children, we began looking to “next Christmas” almost as soon as Christmas was over. Next Christmas was always to be the great, the perfect Christmas, the best of Christmases. No matter how merry the Christmas just passed might have been, next Christmas would be merrier; no matter how splendid the gifts brought to us by this Christmas, the Christmas of next year would bring us finer ones. By that time we should be older and wiser; our parents would do more for us, would trust us to be equal to great responsibilities, and so would set magnificent opportunities before us.
If this year we were given roller skates, then next Christmas we should have bicycles; and when a little boy displayed a toy gun as his richest garnering from the luminous tree, he would say: “Next Christmas my papa’s goin’ to give me a real gun!” To the child’s mind, the really great good time is always for the by and by.
Looking back
In the reveries of old people, the merriest Christmases are those long past, of course. Although the memory of past merriment is not itself merry, but is a chuckle that must turn into a sigh, age will ever maintain that the best of Christmases is not next Christmas, nor any Christmas of the bye and bye, but a Christmas that came long, long ago, in youth or in childhood, or perhaps in young middle age. Yet when that best of Christmases came, those who lived it did not know that it was the best; for as a gentle philosopher has told us, when we are happy we do not know it. But afterward we say, “Ah, I was happy then!”
The Best Christmas
So, at the two ends of life, there are the two Christmases: the Christmas remembered by the old and the Christmas prophesied by the young and both of these Christmases are such stuff as dreams are made of; yet they are the best Christmases, because the best that is in man is made of that stuff–all that he has done best has been made from it and all that he will do best will be made from it. It is the old man’s sigh for Christmas past that proves life has been kind to him; and it is the child’s dream of next Christmas that carries on the world.
For next Christmas, like tomorrow, never comes; yet it is always the Christmas that means the most to all who believe that the world does move, and to all who, thus believing, hope for the gifts of strength and wisdom to aid the moving. Alas, indeed for him “who never sees the stars shine through his cypress trees!”
This Christmas is the Best
And alas for him who never sees them shining through his Christmas tree! Where are the snows of yester-year? They are in the sky, of course, and falling again to give good coasting on the hills. This Christmas is a good Christmas, but next Christmas–ah, the world will light a brighter tree next Christmas!
