Excerpt: "NOT a bit like Christmas. Everybody said so to everybody else, and surely, what all agree about must be strictly true. The farmers' wives said it to each other, as they jogged to market with well-filled baskets, containing all sorts of home-fed Christmas cheer. The butcher said it to each customer in turn, as he lightly passed his keen-edged knife outside the yellow rind of his prime Christmas beef, to suggest where the actual incision should be made and the "cut" severed from the rest. The grocer said it, as he handed over the parcels, so much larger than usual, because of the ingredients required for mince pies, spice bread, and plum pudding. The postman said it, as the wet dripped off his waterproof cape, and he handed letters with moist envelopes to outstretched hands, the owners of which kept well under cover, instead of presenting a smiling face and offering a pleasant greeting to Her Majesty's messenger. Boys and girls in plenty, home from school and boiling over with long-suppressed energy, sat gloomily surveying the prospect, and feeling themselves defrauded. They understood Christmas to mean fun and frolic, notably such as a good, sharp frost brings with it. A Christmas with such weather seemed to have no real ring about it. Where was the good of getting stout nails inserted to roughen boot soles for sliding, of furbishing old or purchasing new skates, if the thin coat of ice on the pond had all disappeared, with no signs of renewal? There had been a few flakes of feathery snow two days ago, but these had changed for sleet, and this for drizzle. The disgusted lads flung aside their skates; the girls, far better off under the circumstances, applied themselves to exclusively feminine occupations and secret preparations for the Christmas-tree. One boy said, gloomily, that he had spent his time in watching the changes out of doors, and stated, for the benefit of his compeers, that these consisted of two varieties only, "squash and splash," -otherwise, as he condescended to explain, of constant drizzle, with a ground accompaniment of thick mud; and steady downpour, with an equally liberal supply of thin ditto. The very horses, as they plodded wearily homeward through country lanes, dragging the wheels along deep ruts temporarily filled with mire, would have joined the human chorus if they could, and declared that such weather was "not a bit like Christmas.""
