Fanny Butcher

“ For the Christmas festivities nowadays the long, luxurious trains which roll into Chicago from the East bring many guests who stay a day and dash on to another city in equally luxurious trains. They don’t realize it, but the city which they are visiting so casually is the railroad center of the United States. Mankind surges through its land gates as it surges through one of the great ports of the world. ”

“ In the mêlée that worms about beneath the tree there are men and women from the four corners of the earth. There are faces moulded in such fantastically different casts that you cannot but wonder how mankind can be all one mankind. ”

“ For many years now Chicago has been known as the ‘pork-packing town.’ Every visitor who comes from overseas insists upon being shown through the ‘Yards.’ English poets have celebrated Chicago for its stockyards odor, and missed the fresh spiritual fragrance of youth and a zest for life that simply exudes from the city through its smoke and its dirt and its city smells. ”

“ Chicago’s delight in its Christmas tree is at the same time the delight of the child in any glittering gaudily lighted scene, and the delight of the youth who remembers his baby days and his passionate belief in Santa Claus and sees in the great tree a monument to the few years that have intervened. ”

“ Mayn’t the city well wear a mammoth Christmas tree as an adornment this Christmas morning when it looks upon its vastness, when it remembers that, from a mere handful of settlers less than ninety years ago, it has become the home of over three millions? [Pg 16] In hundreds of thousands of homes in the vast miles that make Chicago as large and populous as many a monarchy, there are small replicas of the great tree, jeweled with many colored electric bulbs sheltering gifts, each single one of which would have dowered a bride in the older days. ”

“ And all over the city, in its endless miles of boulevards and parks, little brothers of the great tree are glittering against the sky. And underneath those others, as underneath the great tree itself, mankind swishes and huddles and gazes and talks. ”

“ One wealthy old settler tells with heart-breaking candor of his envy at the sight of a playmate who owned and devoured one large orange before his yearning eyes, and how the memory lasted for years. The highly humanized modern doll, that does everything but think, now walks under the adoring eyes of its ‘mama’ and says ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’ with equal tenderness to-day. In the early days a little girl was being pampered by her mother when she found among her useful Christmas gifts a creature made of rags and which had to have all of its talking and walking done for it. ”

“ Parties all over the city as big as a country are gay with boys and girls home from preparatory schools and colleges and fathers and mothers and grandfathers and [Pg 18] grandmothers, all apparently the same age, all living lives made easy by modernity. In the great hotels that face the tree, there are numberless Christmas celebrations, where the guests are all handsomely dinner-jacketed and gowned, all very sophisticated, all having eaten just a little too much and perhaps tippled less wisely than well, dancing something that in the early days of Chicago would have shocked the city fathers. ”

“ The nearest approach to the casual, large, group parties, which the Christmas holidays see nowadays, was, in those days, the Firemen’s Ball. Every one who was any one belonged to the fire brigade. The young blades of the village rivaled one another in their devotion to it. A fire was a social event of the first water. ”

“ The very street, where an elevated whangs by overhead, a street car clangs its warning to the holiday crowds, and ceaselessly honking motors make a bedlam of the air, is the scene of the classic story of the man who, in the early days, was up to his ears in mud. From a spot identical with one which is being stepped over by thousands, so the story goes, a pedestrian offered to throw out a lifeline to the mud-imprisoned neighbor. ”

“ There is a medley of sound, human voices of all the tones of the earth’s surface doing that peculiarly unmusical feat of all talking at once, and being heightened rather than [Pg 5] subdued by the din of the band trying to be heard in a bellowing of that gentle lullaby ‘Heilige Nacht.’ And the overtone is always the honking of impatient motorists or gayly inclined ones who feel that the best way to express approval in modern life is to make as loud and raucous a noise as possible. ”

“ In the old days, every one was so excited about New Year’s Day that they hadn’t time to waste on its eve. In the rare households where the ladies of the family were not receiving, a basket was hung on the doorknob in which the callers left their cards. ”

“ The sidewalks, lined with gaudy windows wheedling dollars from the passers-by and noisy with street hawkers, passionately supply last-minute gew-gaws for the tired men and women who have had to shop late because they had no money to shop early–sidewalks smooth and wide and sturdy to the tramp of millions of feet–not over a lifetime ago were narrow strips of wood, raised on stilts, with enough room underneath for children to play and for rats to hold continuous convention. ”

“ And there is much conversation about the small high-powered roadster that this one found in his Christmas stocking, and the jaunt to Palm Beach as soon as the Christmas gayeties are past, and the new bridge rules, and there is more rich food and bubbly drink. Cosmopolitan, typically modern American they all are, with yearly trips to Europe to furbish up a wardrobe or to buy knick-knacks for the new house. ”

“ A house and an adjacent block of ground could have been purchased with the money that has been spent for one of the many shiny new motor cars that stand in front of hundreds of shiny little brick houses for the first time this Christmas morning. ”