Speaker 1: 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