Christmas omnipresent by Lee Hunt. Christmas comes, He comes, He comes,
ushered with a rain of plums. Hollies in the windows greet him. Schools
come driving posts to meet him. Gifts precede him, Bells proclaim him.
Every mouth delights to name him. Wet and cold and wind and dark make
him but the warmer mark. And yet he comes not one embodied universals,
the blithe Godhead. And in every festal house presence hath ubiquitouse curtains, those
snug room enfolders hang upon his million shoulders, and he has a million eyes
a fire, and eats a million pies, and is very merry, and
wise, very wise, and very merry, and loves a kiss beneath the
berry. Then full many a shape hath he all in said ubiquity? Now
is he a green array, And now an e and now a day.
Now he's town, gone out of town, and now a feast in civic
gown, And now the pantomime and clown with a crack upon the crown,
and all sorts of tumbles down. And then he's music in the night,
and the money gotten by it. He's a man that can't write verses,
bringing some to oap your purses. He's a turkey, he's a goose,
he's oranges unfit for use. He's a kiss that loves to grow underneath the
mistletoe. And he's forfeits, cards and wassails, and a king and queen
with vassals, all the quizzes of the time, drawn and quartered with a
rhyme. And then, for their revival's sake, lo, he's an enormous
cake with the sugar on the top, seen before in many a shop,
where the boys could gaze forever. They think the cake's so very clever.
Then some morning, in the lurch, leaving Romps, he goes to church,
looking very grave and thankful, after which he's just as prankful, now
a saint and now a sinner. But above all he's a dinner. He's
a dinner where you see everybody's family, beef and pudding and mince pies,
and little boys with laughing eyes, whom their seniors ask arch questions, feigning
fears of indigestions, as if they forsooth the old ones hadn't privately tenfold ones.
He's a dinner and a fire heaped beyond your heart's desire heaped with log
and baked with coals till it roasts your very souls and your cheek the fire
outstairs, and you all push back your chairs, and the mirth becomes too
great, and you all sit up too late, nodding, all with too
much head, and so go off to too much bed o, plethora of
beef and bliss, Monkish feaster, sly of kiss, Southern soul in body,
Dutch glorious time of great too much, too much heat and too much
noise, too much babblement of boys, too much eating, too much,
drinking, too much everything but thinking solely bent to laugh and stuff and trample
upon base. Enough, Oh right, is thy instructive praise of the wealth
of Nature's ways. Write thy most unthrifty glee and pious, thy mince piety.
For behold, great Nature's self builds her no abstemious shelf, but provides
her love is such for all her own great good. Too much too much
grass and too much tree, too much air and land and sea, too
much seed of fruit and flower and fish, an unimagined dower in whose single
row shall be life enough to stock the sea. Endless ichthyophogy every instant through
the day. Worlds of life are thrown away, worlds of life and worlds
of pleasure, not for lavishment of treasure, but because she's so immensely rich
and loves us so intensely. She would have us once for all wake at
her benignant call, and all grow wise, and all lay down strife and
jealousy and frown, and like the sons of one great mother, share and
be blessed with one another. End of Christmas Omnipresent by Lee Hunt