To An Old Fogey

(Who Contends that Christmas is Played Out) O FRANKLY bald and obviously stout!

And so you find that Christmas as a fête

Dispassionately viewed, is getting out

Of date.

The studied festal air is overdone;

The humour of it grows a little thin;

You fail, in fact, to gather where the fun

Comes in.

Visions of very heavy meals arise

That tend to make your organism shiver;

Roast beef that irks, and pies that agonise

The liver;

Those pies at which you annually wince,

Hearing the tale how happy months will follow

Proportioned to the total mass of mince

You swallow.

Visions of youth whose reverence is scant,

Who with the brutal verve of boyhood’s prime

Insist on being taken to the pant-

-omime.

Of infants, sitting up extremely late,

Who run you on toboggans down the stair;

Or make you fetch a rug and simulate

A bear.

This takes your faultless trousers at the knees,

The other hurts them rather more behind;

And both effect a fracture in your ease

Of mind.

My good dyspeptic, this will never do;

Your weary withers must be sadly wrung!

Yet once I well believe that even you

Were young.

Time was when you devoured, like other boys,

Plum-pudding sequent on a turkey-hen;

With cracker-mottos hinting of the joys

Of men.

Time was when ’mid the maidens you would pull

The fiery raisin with profound delight;

When sprigs of mistletoe seemed beautiful

And right.

Old Christmas changes not! Long, long ago

He won the treasure of eternal youth;

Yours is the dotage—if you want to know

The truth.

Come, now, I’ll cure your case, and ask no fee:—

Make others’ happiness this once your own;

All else may pass: that joy can never be

Outgrown!

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD