Speaker 1: A great tree by Zona Gale. I never had felt
so much like Christmas, said Calliope Marsh, as I did
that year. I wished, I says, when it got most time,
I wished I knew somebody to have a Christmas tree with. Well,
Calliope Marsh says, Miss Postmaster Sykes, looking surprised on purpose
the way she does. Ain't there enough poor and neglected
folks in this world to please anybody. I didn't say
have a Christmas tree for, I says back at her,
I says, have one with I don't know what you
mean by that difference, she says. I'm sure I don't know.
I says, as I know either, but there is a
difference somewhere. I'd kind of like to have a tree
with folks this year. Why don't you help on your
church tree, Miss Sikes asked me. They're going to spend
quite a little money on theirs this year. I hate
to box Christmas up in a church, I says, why,
Calliopy Marsh, She says, shocked. I didn't want to hurt
her feelings. I ain't never one of those that likes
to throw their IDs in folks faces and watch folks
jump back so I tried to talk about something else,
but she went right on trying her best to help
me out. The ward schools is each going to have
a tree this year, I hear, she says, why don't
you go in on your ward Calliope and help out there.
They'd be real glad of help. You know, I hate
to divide Christmas off into wards. I says to her, Well,
then go in with a family, She says, any of
us will be real glad to have you. She adds, generous,
we would come to ours. We're going to have a
great big tree for the children. I've been stringing popcorn
and cutting the paper for it. Whenever I got an
odd minute. The hole combs they're going to have one too,
and Miss Uppers and Miss Merriman, and even the Hubblefwaits
and Abigail Arnold for her little nieces. I never see
a year when everybody was going to celebrate so nice.
Come on with one of us, why don't you, well,
I says, maybe I will. I'll see. I don't know
yet what I will do. I told her, and I
went off down the street. What I wanted to say
was I hate to box Christmas up in a family,
But I didn't quite dare yet. Friendship. Village ain't ever
looked much more like Christmas to my notion than it
did that December. Just the right snow had come and
no more, and just the right cold and no more.
The moon was getting along stows about the night of
the twenty fifth, that was going to loom up big
and gold and warm over the fields on the flats
where it always comes up in winter, like it had
just edged around there to get sort of a wide
front yard for its big show, where the whole village
could have a porch seat. You know, when you live
in a village, you always know whether the moon is
new or to the full, or where it is and
when it's going to be. But when you live in
a city, you just look up in the sky some
night and say, oh, that's so, there's the moon, and
go right on thinking about something else. Here in the
village that December, everything was getting ready deliberate for a
full moon Christmas, like long ago. The moon and the
cold and the snow and all them public things was
doing their best together for our common Christmas, all but us,
It seemed like all of us humans was working for
it separate tramping along there in the snow. That night,
I thought over what Miss Sykes had said, and about
all the places she'd mentioned over was going to have
Christmas trees. And I looked along to the houses, most
of them lying right there on Daphney Street where they
were going to have them. I could see them all,
one tree after another, lighted and streaming from house to house,
all up and down Daphney Street, just the way they
were going to look. And then there was the little
back streets and the houses down on the flats where
there wouldn't be any trees nor much of any Christmas.
Of course, as Miss Sykes had said, the poor and
the ne neglected are always with us yet, but I
didn't want to pounce down on any of em with
a bag of fruit and a box of animal crackers
and set and watch 'em. That wasn't what I meant
by having a Christmas with somebody. There ought to be
some place, I was beginning to think, when right along
where I was by the market square, I come on
five or six children kicking around in the snow. It
was most dark, but I could just make 'em out.
Eddie Newhaven, Arthur Mills, Lily Dorin and two three more. Hello, folks,
I says, what you doing having a carnival? Because it's
on the market square that carnivals and some little circuses
and things that belongs to everybody is usually celebrated. Little
Arthur Mills spoke up. No, he says, we was just playing.
We selling a load of Christmas trees. Christmas trees? I says,
why that's so? This is where they always bring them,
to sell, big load of them for everybody, ain't it.
They're going to bring an awful big load here this time,
says Eddie Newhaven, big enough for everybody in town to
have one. Most of the fellows is going to have them,
us and Ned Bachis and the cartwright, and Joe Tyrel
and Lifty, all of them. My, I says, what a
lot of Christmas trees? Why if they was set along
by the curbstone here on Daphney Street, I says, just
to please the children and make a little talk with them,
why the line of them would reach all up and
down the town? I says, wouldn't that be fun? Little
Lily claps her hands. Oh yes, she cries, wouldn't that
be fun? With popcorn strings all going from one to
the other. It would be a grand sight, says I,
looking down across the market square there hanging all golden,
quiet like it. Didn't think it amounted too much. Right
over the big Cedar of Lebanon Looking Tree in the
square was the moon crooked to a horn. Once, says
Eddie Newhaven. When they were selling the Christmas trees here,
they kept right on selling them after dark, and they
stood them around here and put a little light in
each one. It was awful nice. Wouldn't it be nice
if they'd do that all over the square sometime? It
would be a grand sighte says I again, but one
that the folks in this town would never have time for.
While I spoke, I was looking down across market Square again,
toward the moon hanging over the Cedar of Lebanon Looking Tree.
There's a pretty good looking tree there already, I says Idle.
What a grand thing it would be, all lit up,
says I, for not much of any reason, only to
keep the talk going with the children. Then something went
through me, from my head to my feet. Why not
light it some time? I says? The children set up
a little shout, part because they liked it, part because
they thought such a thing could never be. I laughed
with them, and I went on up the street. But
all the time something in me kept on saying something
all hurried and as if it meant it, and little
ends of ideas and little jagged edges of other ideas
and plans part raveled out that you thought you could
knit up again, and long sharp notions. A little something
like light kept going through my head and going through
it down to the next corner. I met be Cory
that keeps the livery stable and sings bass to nearly
everybody's funeral and to other public occasions. Ben I says, excited,
though I hadn't thought anything about this till that minute.
Ben you getting up any Christmas Eve Christmas carols to sing?
This year? He had a new string of sleigh bells
over his shoulder, and he gave it a shift. I recollect,
so's they all jingled? Well, he says, I did allow
to do it. But I've spoke to one or two
and they denotes they can do it. Some has got
to sing to churches earlier in the evening, and they
don't know as if they want to tune up all night.
And the most has got to be home for family Christmas.
There ain't, I says, no manner of doubt about the
folks that would be glad to listen? Is there provided
you had the singers? Oh? Sure, he says. Folk shines
up to music considerable Christmas Eve. It sort of well it, yes,
I says, I know it does, don't it? Well, ben Corey,
you get your Christmas carol singers together in a caroling
and I'll undertake that there shan't nothing much stand in
the way of their being out on Christmas Eve? Is
it a bargain? His face lit up all jolly and harty.
Why sure, it's a bargain, he says. I'll get em.
I wanted to only I didn't want to carol em
any more than they wanted to be caroled. I'll get em,
he says, and gives his bells a hunch that made
him ring all up and down Daphney Street. That the
moon was looking down at just as if it was
public property and not all made up of little private
plans with just room enough for us four and no more,
or figures to that effect. I don't know if you've
ever managed any kind of a revolution. There's two kinds
of revolutions. One breaks off of something that's always been.
You pick up the broke piece and try to throw
it away to make room for something that's growing out
of the other part, and most everybody will begin to
tell you that the growing piece ain't any good, but
that the other part is the kind you've always bought,
and that you'd better save it and stick it back on.
But then there's the other kind of revolution that backs
away from something that's always been and looks at it
a little further off than it ever see it before,
and says, let's move a little way around and pay
attention to this thing from a new spot, and real often,
if you put it that way, there's enough people willing
to do that, because they know they can go right
back afterward and stand in the same old place if
they want to. Well, this last was the kind of
a revolution I took charge of that week before Christmas.
I got my plans and my ideas and my notions
all planned and thought and budded, and then I presented
them around abundant the very next morning, after I'd seen
the children. I started out while I had kind of
a glow to drape around the difficulties so's I couldn't
see em. I went first to the store keepers, seeing
Christmas always seems to hinge and hang on what they
say and do. And I went to Eppleby Holcombe because
I knew he'd see it like I'd done, and I
wanted the brace of being agreed with like you do.
Eppleby's store was all decorated up with green cut paper
and tassels and turkey red calico poinsettias, and it looked
real nice and tasty, and the store was full of
the country trade. The little overhead track that took the
bunny had broke down just at the wrong minute, and
old rich missus Wiswell's felt souls had got stuck halfway,
and Eppleby himself was on top of a counter trying
to rescue him for while. She made tart remarks below.
When he'd fished him out and wrapped them up for
appleb I says, would you be willing to shut up
shop on Christmas Eve? Or wouldn't you? He looked kind
of startled. It's a pretty good night for trade, you know, Calliope,
says he doubtful. Why, yes, I says it is. But
everybody that's going to give presents to people, will give
presents to people. And if the stores ain't open Christmas Eve,
folks'll buy him when the stores is open. Is that
sensor eat it? He knew it was, And when I
told him what I got hold of straight places in
my head, he says, if the rest would shut, he'd
shut and be glad of it. Abigail Arnold done the
same about her home bakery and the Gecker Jackson two
three more. But Silas Sykes that keeps the post office store.
He was firm. If that ain't woman foolish, he says,
I don't know what is. You ain't no more idea
of business than so many cats. No, sir, I don't
betray the public by cutting them off of one evening
shopping like that. It made a nice little sentence to quote,
and I quoted it considerable, and the result was the
rest of them that knew. Silas head in heart finally says,
all right, he could keep open if he wanted to
and enjoy himself and they'd all shut up. I honestly
think they kind of appreciated in a nice neighborly way,
making Silas feel mean when he'd ought to it was
a little harder to make the Sunday school. Soon superintendents
see the thing that I had in my head. Of course,
when a thing has been the way it's been for
a good while, you can't really blame people for feeling
that it's been the way it ought to be. Feeling
seems made that way. Our superintendent has been our superintendent
for most forty years, ever since the church was built,
and of course his thought has kind of turned to
bone in some places. Naturally. His name is Jerry Beamis,
and he keeps a little harness shop next door to
the town Hall that's crossed from Market Square. When I
went in that day, he was resting from making harnesses
and he was practicing on his cornet. He can make
a bugle call real nice. You can often hear it
going up and down Daphney Street in the morning, and
when I'm down doing my trading, I always like to
hear it. It gives me kind of a nice old
fashioned feeling, like when abbag Gail Arnold fries doughnuts in
the back of the home bakery and we can all
smell them out in the road. Jerry I says, how
much is our Sunday School Christmas tree going to cost us.
Jerry's got a wooden leg and he cannot remember not
to try to cross it over the other one. He
done that now and give it up. We calculate about
twenty five dollars, says he. Proud. What we're going to
do to celebrate well, he says, half speaking pieces. We
got a program of twenty numbers already, says he pleased.
And a trim tree, and an orange and a bag
of nuts and candy for every child, he says. All
the other churches is going to do the same. I says,
five trees and five programs and five sets of stuff
all around, and all of them on Christmas Eve, when
you'd think we'd all sort of draw together instead of
setting apart and cleiks land, I says out that first
Christmas Eve, wouldn't the angels have stopped singing and wept
in the sky if they could have seen what we'd
do to it? Hush calliope, says Jerry, Beamus shocked. They
ain't no need to be sacrilegious? Is they not? A bit?
Says I. We've been at so long already, worshiping around
in sections like Hottentots. Well, now, I says, do you
honestly think we've all chose the best way to go
at Christmas Eve for the children, filling them up with
colored stuff and getting their stomachs all upset. We had
quite a little talk about it, back and forth, Jerry
and me, and all of a sudden, while I was
trying my best to make him see what I saw,
I happened to notice his bugle again. There ain't no thrill,
none of it, I was saying to him, not half
so much, I says, as there is in your bugle.
When I hear that go floating up and down the street,
I always feel like it was announcing something. To my notion,
I says, it could announce Christmas to the town far
better than forty eleven little separate trimmed up trees. Why, Jerry,
I says, out sudden, listen to what I've thought of.
A little something had come in my head that minute, unexpected,
that fitted itself into the rest of my plan, And
it made Jerry say pretty soon that he was willing
to go with me to see the other superintendents, and
we done so that very day. Ain't it funny how
big things work out by homely means, by homely means.
So because the choir leader in one choir had resigned,
because the base in that quo was the base in
that choir, and so they didn't have anybody there to
train their Christmas music. And so because another congregation was
hard up and was having to borrow its Christmas celebration
money out of the Foreign Missionary Fund, we got them
to see sense, and then the other two joined in.
The schools were all right from the first, being built
like they are on a basis of belonging to everybody,
same as breathing in one to two other public utilities,
and nothing dividing anybody from anybody. And I began to
feel like life in the world was just one great
bud longing to open so be it could get enough care.
The worst ones to get weaned away from a perfectly
selfish way of observing Christ's birthday was the private families
land Land, I kept saying to myself them days, we
all of us act like we was studying kindergarten mathematics.
We count up them, that's closest to us, and we can't.
None of us seem to count much above ten, not
all of them was that way though. Well, if it
just happens that you live in any town whatever, in
the civilized world, I think you'll know about what I
had said to me. On the one hand, it went
about like this from miss Timothy Toplady, and the Holcombs
and the Hubblethwaites and a lot more. Well Land knows
that it save us a lot of back aching work.
But will the children like it? Like it? I says,
try them, trust them without trying them if you want to,
I would remember, I couldn't help adding. You like to
be with the children a whole lot oftener than they
liked to be with you. What they like is to
be together. And well, do you honestly think it'll work?
I don't see how it can anything so different? And well,
they ain't no harm trying it one year, as I
can see. That can't break up the holidays as I
know of. But the other side had figured it out,
just like the other side of everything always figures. Calliope,
says miss Postmaster Sykes. Are you crazy headed? What's your id?
Ain't things all right the way they've always been done? Well,
says I conservative, not all of them, not wholesale. I
wouldn't say. But you can't go changing things like this,
She told me, what'll become of Christmas? Christmas? I says,
don't need you or me, Miss Sykes, to be its guardians.
All Christmas needs is for us to get out of
its way and leave it at express what it means.
But the home Christmas, she says, most like a whale.
Would you do away with that? Then I sort of
turned on her. I couldn't help it. Who's home, I
says stern. If it's your home you mean, or any
of the thousands of others like it where Christmas is kept,
then you know, and they all know that nothing on
earth can take away the Christmas feeling and the Christmas
joy as long as you want it to be there.
But if it's the homes you mean, and there's thousands
of them where no Christmas ever comes, you surely ain't
arguing to keep them the way they've been kept. But
she continued to shake her head. You can do as
you like, of course, she said, And so can everybody else.
It's their privilege. But as for me, I shall trim
my little tree here by our own fireside, and here
we shall celebrate Christmas. Jetty and Nora, and father and me.
Why can't you do both? I says, I wouldn't have
you give up your fireside and of things for anything
on earth, But why can't you do both? Miss Sykes
didn't rightly seem to know, at least she didn't say,
but she give me to understand that her mind run
right along and the self same groove it had had
made for it cozy. Somehow, the longer I live, the
less sense I seem to have. There's some things I've
learned from twenty five to thirty times in my life,
and yet I can't seem to remember them, no more
than I can remember whether it's sul fight or sulfate
of soda that I take for my quincy. And one
of these is about taking things casual that night for
an hours. Instance, when I come round the corner onto
Daphney Street at half past seven on Christmas Eve, I
thought I was going to have to waste a minute
or two standing just where the billboard makes a shadow
for the arc light, trying to get used to the
idea of what we were doing, used to it in
my throat. But there wasn't much time to spend that
way being there were things to do between then and
eight o'clock when we'd told them all to be there.
So I ran along and tried not to think about
it except the work part, most always the work part
of anything. I'll steady you. The great Cedar of Lebanon
looking tree standing down there on the edge of the
market square and acting as if it had been left
from some long ago forest on purpose, had been hung
round with lines and lines of strung popcorn, the kind
that no Christmas tree would be a Christmas tree without,
because so many many folks a set up stringing at
nights of Christmas week after the children was in bed,
and has kept it careful in a box. So's it
a doe for next year? We had all that from
the churches Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopal and Baptist and
Catholic popcorn, and you couldn't tell them apart at all
when you got them on the tree. The festoons showed
ghostly white in the dark, and the folks showed ghostly black,
hurrying back and forth doing the last things. And the
folks was coming. You could hear them all along Daphney Street,
tripping on the bad place that hadn't been mended, because
it was right under the arc light, and coming over
the hollow sounding place by Graham's drug store, and coming
from the little side streets and the dark back streets
and the streets down on the flats. Some of them
had Christmas trees waiting at home. The load had been
there on the market square, just like we had let
it be there for years, without seeing that the market
square had any other Christmas uses. And a good many
had bought trees, but a good many more had decided
not to have any, only just to hang up stockings
and to let the great, big common Christmas tree stand
for what it stood for, gathering most of that little
garland of Daphney Street trees up into its living heart
over by the bandstand. I come on them. I'd been
looking for Eddie Newhaven and Arthur Mills and Lily Dorin
and Sarah and Molly and the cartwrights and lifty and
six eight more. Hello, folks, I says, what you down
here for? Why ain't you home? They answered altogether for
the big tree? Are you now? I says, Just to
keep on a talking to them? Whose tree? I love
to remember the way? They answered? It was Eddy Newhaven
that said it. Why all of us is? He said,
all of us is? I like to say it over
when they get to saying mine, And there's too hard
where I am. When it was eight o'clock and there
was enough gathered on the square, they'd done the thing
that was going to be done. Only nobody had known
how well they were going to do it. They touched
the button, and from the bottom branch to the tip
top little cone, the big old tree came a light,
just like it knew what it was all about, and
like it had come out of the ground long ago
for this reason, only we'd never known. Two hundred little
electric lights there were colored and paid for private, though
I'd done my best to get the town to pay
for them, like it ought to do for its own tree.
But they was paid for. Yet it made a little
oh come in the crowd and run around. It was
so big and beautiful, standing there against the stars, like
it knew well enough that it was one of them,
whether we knew it or not. And coming up across
the flats, big and gold and low, was the moon,
most full like it belonged to, and glory shone around,
I says to myself, And I stood there feeling the
glory outside and in. Not my little celebration and your
little celebration and their little celebration private that was costing
each of us more than it ought to, but our
celebration paying attention to the message that Christ paid attention to.
I was so full of it that I didn't half
see ben Corey and his carrollers come racing out of
the dark. They was all fixed up in funny pointed
hoods and in cloaks and carrying long staves with everybody's
barnyard lanterns tied on the end of them. And they
run out in a line down to the tree, and
they took hold of hands and danced around it, singing
to their voices top a funny old tune, one of
them tunes that, whether you've ever heard it before or not,
kind of makes things in you that's older than you
are yourself. Wake up and remember real plain And Jerry
Beemas shouted out at him, sing it again, sing it again,
and pounded his wooden leg with his cane, sing it again.
I tell you, I ain't heard anybody sing that for
going on forty years. And everybody laughed, and they sung
it again for him, and some more songs that had
come out of the old country, that a little bit
of it was living inside everybody that was there. And
while they were singing, it came to me all of
a sudden, about another night, most three hundred years before,
when on American soil, that lonesome English heart up there
in Boston had dreamed ahead to a time when Christmas
would come here. But faith unrolls the future scrolls Christmas
shall not die, nor men of English blood and speech
forget their ancestry or any other blood or any other
speech that has in it the spirit of what Christ
came to teach. And that's all of us. And it
fell to me as if now we were only just
beginning to take out our little, single, lonely tapers and
carry them to light a great tree. Then just after
the carols died down, the thing happened that we'd plan
to happen. Over on one side, the choirs of all
the churches that I guess had never sung together in
their lives before, though they'd been singing steadily about the
self same thing since they was born. Choirs begun to
sing Silent Night, Holy Night. Think of it down there
on the Market Square that had never had anything sung
on it before except carnival tunes and circus tunes all
up and down Daphney Street. It must have sounded, only
there was hardly anybody far off to hear it, the
most of them being right there with all of us.
They sung it without anybody playing it for him, and
they sung it from first to last, and then they
slipped into another song that isn't a Christmas carol exactly,
nor not any song that comes in the book under Christmas,
but something that comes in just as natural as if
it was another name for what Christmas was. Nearer my
God to thee, and lead kindly light and some more.
And after a bar or two of the first one,
the voices all around begun kind of mumbling and humming
and carrying the tunes along in their throats, without anybody
in particular starting him there. And then they all just
naturally burst out and sung too. And so I don't
know who done it, whether the choirs had planned it
that way, or whether they just thought of it then,
or whether somebody in the crowd struck it up unbeknownst
to himself, or whether the song begun to sing itself.
But it come from somewhere strong and clear and real,
the song that the children had been learning in school
and has been teaching the town for a year or
two now, sung to the tune of vogdum Rhine, the
crest and crowning of all good. Life's common goal is brotherhood.
And then everybody sung, because that's a piece you can't
sing alone. You cannot sing it alone. All over the
market square they took it up. And the folks that
couldn't sing, and me that can't sing a note except
when there's nobody around that would recognize me if they
saw me again, we all sung together there in the dark,
with the tree in the midst and we seemed long
and long away from the time when the leader in
one of them singing choirs had left the other choir
because the bass in the other choir was the bass
in the other choir. And it was like the way
things are had suddenly spoke for a minute there, and
the singing choirs come out of their separate lofts, and
in all the singing folks and in all of us,
all of us then up hopped Eppleby Holcombe onto a
box in front of the tree, and he calls out
Mary Christmas, Merry Christmas on the first annual outdoor Christmas
Tree celebration of Friendship Village. When he said that, I felt, well,
it don't make any difference to anybody how I felt.
But what I'd done was to turn and make for
the edge of the crowd just as fast as I could,
And just then there come what Elbelebee's words was the
signal for and out on the little flagstaff balcony of
the town hall. Jerry Beamus stepped with his bugle and
he blew it to shrill and clear, so that it
sounded all over the town once, twice, three times a
bugle call to say it was Christmas. We couldn't wait
till twelve o'clock. We are all in bed long before
that time in Friendship Village, Holiday or not. But the
bugle call said it was Christmas, just the same think
of it the bugle that used to say it was war.
And the same minute the big tree went out, all
still and quiet, but to be lit again next year,
and to stay a living thing in between. When I
stepped on to Daphney Street, who should I come face
to face with but miss Postmaster Sykes. I was feeling
so glorified over that I never thought of its being
strange that she was there. But she spoke up, just
the same as if I'd said, why I thought you
wasn't coming. The children was bound to come, she says,
so I had to bring em. Yes, I thought to myself,
the children know, they know. And I even couldn't feel
bad when I passed the post office store and see
Silas sitting there, all soul alone, the only lit store
in the street. I knew he'd be on the market
square the next year. They went singing through all the
streets that night, ben Corey and his carollers Silent Night,
Holy Night, come from my front gate. When I was
most asleep. It was like the whole town was being
sung to by something that didn't show. And when the
time comes of this, something speaks clear all the time.
Well it ain't a very far off time, you know.
End of a Great Tree by Zona Gale