Requiem for Holidays

The rate of a person's descent into senility can be gauged, it is said, by the degree to which he reminisces. If he harks back to The Good Old Days no more than a couple of dozen times a week, he is considered competent to function; if, however, he is a compulsive reminiscer, forever glorifying the past to the debasement of the present, he is patted on the head and fed soft foods. Certainly he is not taken seriously. Why should he be? Old coots are the same everywhere. Because they've survived the past, they love it, and because they're not at all certain they'll survive the present, they hate it. Of course, that would not be their explanation of the value judgment. To them, the world was indeed a better place when they were young. The girls were prettier then, the men were stronger, the games wilder, the grass greener, the sun warmer, the stairs less steep, and oh! if they could only go back. But they can't, and that's a blessing, because they would find their world as dark and frightening and confusing as the children of today find theirs.

It would be a mistake, however, to ascribe all the maunderings of the compulsive reminiscer to senility. Occasionally his judgments are correct. When the coot tells you that the girls were prettier, you have only to remember the times you searched through old magazines and photograph albums and decided, at last, that there simply weren't any pretty girls before 1940; but when he tells you that they don't build cars in the U. S. Like They Used To, or houses, or toys, you'd better listen. He's right. Those things are gone, probably forever, and their shoddy replacements are all this generation will know. The Stutz Bearcat, the Duesenberg, the rumble-seated Auburn, the Hispano-Suiza sit in cold museums, each a silent reproach to those who dignify today's mobile fashion salons with the word car. The rock-solid houses, sunk to their knees in the earth, are likewise curiosities, considered impractical by those who make do with the crumbling pink echo chambers of this age. The lead soldiers have given way to plastic thermonuclear missiles, with convenient destructible cities included at slightly higher cost.

These counterfeits of glories past are saddening. But there is one loss we've sustained that is more than that -- it is tragic, for its counterfeit is unquestionably the shoddiest of all.

I speak of the most important, most joyous time of a child's life, any child, anywhere, from the beginning of civilization until recently: the time of the Holiday.

The very word had magic, as it does not any longer. It had the thunder of fireworks in it; the smell of turkey; the feel of cold sweat forming in the armpits and coursing slowly down the sides; the kaleidoscopic picture of eviscerated pumpkins and horrified neighbors; of running hard in the lowering darkness, away from, toward, it didn't matter; of ghosts and explosions and Xs on the calendar ("Only 23 more days!") and impossible things like cars on roofs and tin cans sailing clear to the sun and that bike ("For the last time, no! You're too young for a bicycle and, besides, it's much too expensive."). You thought, holiday, and you thought of these things, but mostly you thought of the awful, delicious waiting. Life was little more than that: waiting for the next holiday, feeling the pressure build up inside until it threatened to burst your heart. At night, after the radio programs, after the Big Little books and comics, read by flashlight underneath the covers, you lay awake and planned what to ask for next Christmas, what insidious prank to perpetrate next Halloween, what ruse to employ in order to avoid sharing with the guys the cherry bombs next Fourth of July. Whoever tasted of that sweet pain will never forget, for no matter how wild the dream, it always came true, which is why the pain was sweet. Holidays were worth it, and more. They were life at its keenest edge, at its heavenly, lawless, joyful best.

Now they are gone. Of course, the world that supported them is gone, too, but who is responsible for that? The kids? Did they ask anyone to take the holidays away? No; they were robbed, and we, the reminiscers, are the culprits, for we are the ones who are making the world of the present. And we ought to be ashamed.

Having created the safe and sane Fourth, the lifetime aluminum Christmas tree and the trick-or-treat bag, we now sit about drinking martinis and sighing bitterly about The Kids Nowadays. The fact is, we have a right to sling the booze -- but not on their account. The guilt is entirely ours. We are the They who commercialized the holidays, who cheapened them, who tamed them; and we are the They who have got to bring them back.

• • •

Enter the ghosts:

Halloween. Almost nonexistent now, a spiritless, jejune couple of hours one night a year, a shuffling parade of tots in dime-store costumes, each as frightening as Minnie Mouse, a ringing of doorbells, a bit of extortion, carefully observed from the shadows by curiously proud parents, a few nervous giggles, out at seven, in at nine, the end. And what did Halloween used to be? A time to howl, to rage, to scream, to raise the dead and stun the living, long into the dark October night and beyond; a time for rising hackles and goose flesh; a time for every block in every city and town to become its own Bald Mountain, as the kids were turned loose. God help the parents who asked to come along then: their bones would have been picked clean in a wink. And God help the neighbor who wouldn't let the guys get their football out of his yard, or the storekeeper who wouldn't allow any of his regular customers to swipe a few jawbreakers, or the truant officer whose bloodhound's nose spoiled many a delightful afternoon of hooky. Above all, God help anyone who hadn't the foresight to nail down everything removable. The genies were out of the bottle and the world was theirs.

Genies -- or prisoners? For 364 days of the year we were that, obeying the rules, more or less; but on this day, we rioted. Incredibly, the jailers were good sports about it, too. I doubt that they could have been very happy about the commotion, but they bore up, and sometimes, when they caught you, a strange light would come into their eyes and they would tell you a few of the things they did when they were kids. And you grew a little, and learned a little, then.

Still, you couldn't believe that past Halloweens were any better. What could be more fantastical than some of the feats of your generation? The ice wagon on the roof of the bandstand cupola -- how did it get there? A backbreaking job for a dozen workmen with a crane, impossible for kids. But there it would be the next morning for the rising world to gaze at, all aghast. Perhaps the pyramids were so created, and the other wonders, too.

Of course, we held the strenuous magic to a minimum -- show your power, but don't abuse it; the rest was mischief. Why it didn't land the lot of us in actual jails is difficult to understand. A sample evening: 10 masked goblins creeping stealthily up the back stairs of an apartment building, silent as mortal sin, each with a garbage pail; up to the roof, over to the edge; the 10 pails suspended for a lovely, giddy moment, then released; another moment of silence, and the sweetest, most marvelous tin thunder ever heard. Lights going on, doors flying open, goblin feet pelting down the stairs, across the littered yard, and on to the next challenge. Over to the building where the Rich People live, the one with the foyer and the speaking tubes and the downstairs door buzzer. Press the little black button; wait. "Yes? Who is it?" Select the biggest light bulbs in the package. "Who is it, please?" Start dropping the bulbs onto the echoing tile floor. "Don't do it, Rocky, don't kill me!" Pow! "I didn't squeal on ya!" Pow! "Somebody help me!" Pow! "Ya got me!" Pow, pow! And out, and on.

It was a start, but nothing more: the evening was young. There were windows to be soaped, pins to be stuck in doorbells, nonexistent ropes to be stretched taut across busy thoroughfares and, later, young ones to be horrified with the most blood-chilling stories imaginable.

The rule was, it was all right to frighten, to shock and to surprise, but never to damage. Though some of the boys got carried away and turned hooligan and hoodlum, breaking windows, slashing tires, annoying the sick and the elderly, they were in the minority and their activities were frowned upon by everyone. They broke the code, which was a rigid one. Most of us knew exactly how far we should go. We knew that the lunatic fringe could spoil things for the real pranksters, who had lots of devilment but little malice in their hearts.

It is true that in years past there were jack-o-lanterns with corn-silk mustaches, and old sheets and hooded masks, but these things were for infants -- today's only Halloween participants, if such they can be called. They didn't count. They had nothing to do with the celebration. Then, when a child reached the age of eight, he was turned out to run with the pack this one night of the year, without any admonition to be home early. And he was made to understand by his friends, if he didn't understand already, that vileness was what went on among grownups, not among creatures of his own kind. That is why there was so little damage, and no real vengeance; just a letting off of built-up steam.

And how much steam is let off by shuffling from door to door and mumbling "Trick or treat," with the treat guaranteed? It is all taken for granted now. Tell the toddlers that you choose to be tricked and they are thrown into confusion, retreating nervously to their fathers or mothers, eight steps away. And thus conformity has dulled the edge of even this tame sport, for the fact is, today's Halloweener doesn't know how to trick. And why should he waste his time thinking about it, anyway, when there are treats, specially prepared for the occasion by the candy manufacturers, waiting at the next house?

A pox on us: we have bribed the children into submissiveness. It is we who have tricked them, and the trick is a dirty one.

It fills one with uneasiness and apprehension to realize how debased this fine holiday is from what it has been throughout the centuries. The eve of "All Hallows," or All Saints' Day, is actually a Christian appropriation of an ancient pagan festival of autumn wherein games, pranks and ghostly tales predominated. It was considered, wisely, to be necessary to the human spirit. The Druids, an order of priests in Gaul and Britain, held their autumn feast at about the same time that the Romans celebrated the festival of Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees, and other sex-linked events, and the two customs were combined to be perpetuated as Halloween. Perhaps we inherited more from the Romans than from the Druids, for the Romans had an obsession with cruelty that ran through all their festivals, with mischief on the grand scale. The popular and accepted picture of luxurious banquets with harmless indulgences and pleasures is less than accurate. They raised a species of hell beside which our own October evenings were nothing more than lawn parties.

From the Druids we still have the practice of lighting bonfires on the 31st, though we've forgotten the attendant superstitions, nor do we follow the habit of feasting on nuts, apples and parsnips. The date was known in Ireland as the Vigil of Saman, and on this night peasants assembled with sticks and clubs and went from house to house collecting money, breadcake, butter, cheese and eggs for the feast They may not have said "Trick or treat," but their intentions were clear. In Scotland it was the custom for boys to push the pith from a stalk of cabbage, fill the cavity with tow, set the tow on fire, insert the stalk in the keyhole of the Grouch's house, and blow darts of flame more than a yard in length. If this did not adequately startle him, they would bombard his home with rotten cabbages. The custom of high jinks on October 31 came to America with every sect and nationality, each with a different heritage, and it was all coalesced into the celebration we knew and loved, the wild, wonderful night of release, and we have taken this centuries-honored holiday and turned it into a nursery game for diapered tots.

• • •

The fate of the Fourth of July is no less sobering.

What started out in 1776 as a unique and stirring day of commemoration, completely American in origin and observance, has declined to just another day off the job, or out of school, a chance to watch a double-header in the afternoon and a few pyrotechnic displays in the evening. Absent from the scene are the pulse-quickening brass bands and parades, the flamboyant oratory unflinchingly listened to by great crowds in the heat of the day, with the small boys and their firecrackers on the periphery; the first fried chicken of the year, the best ice cream that ever was (give the freezer 100 more strokes after the dash gets hard to turn), strawberry pop that cost a nickel for a quart bottle; and the daring mustached balloon ascensionist who climbed into the basket, waved and was whisked off, up and away, by God, while the crowds stood agape.

It was the time of thrills, of distant thunder, getting louder, of warm days getting warmer, until the glorious Fourth itself dawned scorching, and the thunder, was now inside you. No ulcers then, no hypertension. Just the wonderful release of fireworks. With them you would make the loudest bangs ever heard, blast cranky people out of their doldrums, feel the independence that must have stirred (continued on page 178) Requiem for Holidays (continued from page 128) the men of the Continental Army. And maybe you thought about those men as you lighted your 10-inchers, because the sounds they made were the skirmishing of muskets.

We have different sounds now, and bigger bangs, but they provide no relief of tension. Thinking about them sends a shudder down the spine, for they are sound and fury, signifying nothingness.

Explosions were not presages of imminent obliteration yesterday, so we enjoyed them for their own sake and ours, and we enjoyed the creation of them. What smell is there now to match the heady, dense aroma of the burning punk you used to light your ladyfingers? What smell to suggest the excitements ahead?

What excitements? the kids today will ask, for they don't know. And how does one express the joy that was felt upon listening to the boom of a flashcracker dropped into a sewer, the echo it made all the way up and down the line, or watching and sniffing that acrid plume of smoke rising gently from the half-moon hole in the manhole cover?

How do you describe the look on the face of the streetcar motorman when he ran over the torpedoes you set in his tracks? Surprised, you say, annoyed, but patient, tolerant, full of memories of his own, how it used to be with him this night ... but it's no good. The look has disappeared.

Oh, the Fourth of July was a fine day, you want to tell this generation, a fine, wonderful, violent day. There was the smell of burnt gunpowder in the air always, and the only silence the short wait between explosions.

"What did you do?"

You lighted firecrackers underneath cans and you ran a few steps and turned and watched the cans fly up.

You buried firecrackers up to their fuses in dirt and set them off.

"Didn't you get dirty?"

Very.

"What else?"

Well, you played with sons-o-guns.

"What are--"

Little red wafers about the size of a penny. You stepped on them with your heel and then whirled yourself around and around while they snapped and hissed and banged in a fury, and the girls all held their ears.

"Go on."

You held ladyfingers in your hand and, with great daring and arrogance, touched the punk to them: and they would begin to sizzle, but you wouldn't let go--

"Didn't they go off in your fingers?"

Yes, but they didn't hurt, if you knew how to hold them -- loosely, at the very ends.

You shot off rockets, of course. And hurled cherry bombs.

"We've still got those!"

No, you don't. Our cherry bombs were glittery red grenades that exploded on contact with any unyielding surface, such as, say, a passing coal truck. But it was the firecrackers that we loved best. They came in all sizes, 1-inchers to 10-inchers, and you bought them in packets at any clime store. First you ripped off the paper, which was an odd, crinkly wax-colored paper that came from Japan, usually, with funny drawings of American children with Oriental eyes, and then you started taking the 'crackers apart. They had their long white fuses knotted together, and--

"Weren't they dangerous?"

Sure, but that was part of the fun.

"They're against the law."

The history books say we won the American Revolution, but it appears that big segments of the independence we fought for are being lost. We let them talk us out of sharing the risks of the Continental troops, and a bit of that glory, when we let them (us) outlaw firecrackers. True, there were accidents, injuries, even deaths, but they did not come close to the number we see today -- mostly incurred in automobiles going to and from the beaches, the picnic grounds and those parks where they have the fireworks displays. In the outlaw years, every kid with the meagerest smattering of intelligence knew enough to leave a dud alone. Who didn't know enough to get out of the way of the cascading brilliance of Roman candles? Everybody did.

The dangers were not so much with the regular fireworks as with the homemade variety. For a few cents you could get horse capsules and a generous supply of potassium chlorate and red phosphorus from the corner drugstore, and the pharmacist wouldn't bat an eye when you asked for it. You went home with your purchase then and packed your own torpedoes by mixing the ingredients and inserting them in the capsules. Wherever thrown, they would go off with a resounding blast -- almost as good as cherry bombs. The only thing was, you had to be careful not to make any jerky movements or they would go off in your pockets, which sometimes happened. Then there was potassium chlorate and sulphur. In the right combination, this mixture could be detonated with a brick, a stone or a hammer, and the resulting bang was often better than anything provided by the manufacturers.

There were few homemade rockets, but there were plenty of innovations in the matter of sending them off. Rain-spouts were preferred, and a six-foot drainpipe was a thing to treasure all year as the ideal Fourth-of-July launching pad. You could buy two rockets for as little as a few pennies or as much as three dollars. The expensive ones had shell-bursts. It made you feel uneasy to see your money going up in smoke, but when you saw the magnificent star-filled trail across the night sky, and the explosion of color at the apogee, you knew it was worth it.

That was a time when nobody thought boys were by nature obedient, cheerful or kind. Boys were considered, with perfect reason, scamps, rascals, young devils. Their boundless energy was the dismay of their elders, who knew that it had to be spent somehow, or else it would implode. So everyone thought it completely natural that the kids should release their tensions with firecrackers, pinwheels and the whole catalog of noisemakers: not only natural but salubrious. Dad, who was always close with his money, could be counted on to lay in a big supply. You knew what you wanted, you told him what to get, but he invariably over-extended himself when you got him to the fireworks stand. The only real problem then was to keep him from shooting them all off himself.

You had the long, full day of explosions, and then you crawled into bed at night, dirty, exhausted, sometimes bandaged and blistered; and you arose the next morning miraculously free of frustrations, satisfied with yourself, ready, if not precisely willing, to cope with the gray unrealities. The battle had been won, but the war was still in progress -- you against peace and quiet -- and there would always be this holiday.

What remains of the grand and glorious Fourth? Certainly none of the color, or very little of it: here and there an American flag, the occasional faraway thump of a smuggled 'cracker, but mostly quiet streets, deserted cities, a few family picnics, perhaps a band concert or two, and a total absence of pageantry. The kids spend the day now at the beaches, or the community swimming pools, or in front of their television sets, where they are every other day of summer. The only difference is the lethargic half-hour or so they devote to the legal fireworks -- a pale, hissing ghost of the assortments of yesterday -- and the evening trip to the park. There, if you have the stomach to fight the crowds, the strangers and the nostalgia, you can see -- at a discreet distance -- displays that might have been staged by Ziegfeld. They are as lovely as flower gardens, and approximately as exciting. That this is true is borne out by the fact that they get shorter and shorter every year, and less imaginative. There is the $500 display, the $1000 display and maybe, if the town is large enough, the $2000 display, which generally lasts 30 minutes. The money for these nods toward the past is extracted from merchants and city treasurers, most of whom bewail the pointless expense. Judging from their public comments, one would assume that they regard the custom of shooting off fireworks on the Fourth as a ridiculous waste of time and cash.

President John Adams once said, "I am apt to believe that [Independence Day] will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore." That it is not so celebrated is no fault of that misunderstood patriot. The early Independence Days were occasions for shows, games, sports; for military music and fireworks; but in 1954 Congress passed an act prohibiting the transportation of fireworks into any state where their sale is forbidden, which was almost all the states, and that was the end of the holiday. Once again, Americans withdrew from the role of participants and became, as in so many other areas, spectators. But, as we see, soon there may be nothing for them to look at.

• • •

Even so innocent a holiday as St. Valentine's Day has been subrogated by do-gooders who don't want to see anybody hurt, and by commercial interests. The day persists despite the fact that it is no holiday at all, nobody gets out of school, nobody gets a day off work because of it. Yet stores reportedly devote as much space to Valentine's Day cards as to any others.

It was never much talked about. Boys pretended it didn't exist, except perhaps as a scheme on the part of silly and detested girls to embarrass them. They winced and grimaced at the very mention of the occasion. Yet Valentine's Day accounted for the first stirrings of exultant joy and suicidal pain that could not be linked to any past experience. Of course no boy would ever admit to anything but contempt for the practice of handing out the little heart-shaped cards, but each secretly hoped that he would get one. If he did, he would strike a sneering posture (after making sure that his friends were apprised of his fortune) and, more often than not, tear the idiot thing into a dozen pieces. If he did not, he would lie and say that he had. And that night he would go to bed blinking away the tears, more certain than ever of his outcast state.

The stirrings were sexual, and in a peculiar, instinctive way, the boys knew it, even though they didn't know what sexual was. It was the time of humiliation, when your body began to betray you, but you couldn't see the connection. Every boy in puberty has known the unspeakable horror of having his imminent manhood stir and rise, like a disembodied thing over which he has no control, on the school bus, or a minute before the English teacher calls him up to the blackboard to diagram a sentence. And every boy has spoken silently to the abominable member, pleading with it, commanding it, entreating it, to no avail. Nothing ever worked. Neither thinking about "other things," as someone had advised, nor exerting physical pressure. It always remained at attention just long enough to flood the boy's face with red as, with one hand plunged into his pocket, he attempted to look casual.

Valentine's Day was the time for that trauma as no other time was. The boys avoided each other's eyes and blushed and the girls giggled. It was awful and, once you found out that you were not the only one so afflicted, it was wonderful.

It may be that Valentine's Day was begun in honor of this awakening. While its origin has been lost in antiquity, it has been traced to the Roman Lupercalia, which were feasts held in February, to honor Pan and Juno. At that time it was the custom to place the names of young women in a box and to have these names drawn out by young men as chance directed. The girls became the men's "valentines" for an entire year, during which time gifts and favors were exchanged, with no limits imposed or expected. The Christian clergy, finding the practice less than pleasing, introduced a modification: they substituted the names of saints for those of girls. But they did not reckon with the nature of pubescent and postpubescent males. Within a very short time, the saints were returned to their perpetual abode and the girls brought out again. It was an altogether satisfactory arrangement, achieving the status of the holiday in France and England during the 16th Century.

Actually, there were two St. Valentines, and neither was a specialist in affairs of the heart. The first was a Roman priest who stood steadfast to his faith during the Claudian persecutions and was, in consequence, beaten with clubs and then beheaded. What is left of him is preserved in the church of St. Praxedes in Rome. The second St. Valentine was a Roman bishop and he fared no better, suffering decapitation a few years after the first. Either gentleman would no doubt be surprised to find himself a lover's saint.

In the 17th Century it became the custom for a man to give a woman a present if he was challenged by her with the words "Good morrow, 'tis St. Valentine's Day." From Samuel Pepys we get the first record of what would become the modern valentine, also an insight into a charming, vanished custom. He writes (February 14, 1667): "This morning came up to my wife's bedside little Will Mercer to be her valentine, and brought her name writ upon blue paper, in gold letters, done by himself and very pretty; and we were both well pleased with it."

What has happened in the interval was, of course, inevitable. Valentine's Day has become a negligible and vanishing custom, reserved for that species known as the pre-teen. It slouches into the drugstore, grabs up a haphazard collection of cheap cards, some egregiously sentimental, some sadistic (known as "Un-Valentine cards"), all abominably rhymed ("This is the Time / For You to know / I love you so / My Valentine") and slouches over to the post office. A few signatures, into the slot with the bundle, and out; the end.

Old cootism? Senility? Perhaps, but only if the sexual awakening has been moved back to the ages of eight, nine and ten, which is possible but, to me, doubtful. At any rate, that is the age group to which Valentine's Day is presently confined, and before long I expect the five-year-olds to claim it as their personal property. Which suggests to me that it has lost a bit of its original meaning.

• • •

Christmas has lost all of its original meaning, fortunately. As we shall see, the celebration began as a sort of bacchanal, bearing even less resemblance to the holiday we remember than the present debacle, though of the two, I'm not so sure I don't prefer the former. It had, at least, the virtue of spontaneity. It had joy and excitement. And the lack of these qualities is what has ruined, or is ruining, Christmas.

Expurgated reference works tell us that December 25 was already a festive day for the sun god Mithras and appealed to Christians as an appropriate date to commemorate the birth of Jesus, "The Light of the World," around 534 A.D. Some theologians, of course, deny this, claiming the day to be nothing more nor less than the date of Christ's birth. However, other historical scholars hold that the time of the winter solstice throughout recorded history was something else entirely. The Romans' Saturnalia began on December 17 and continued for a week with no limits imposed, the point being total abandonment of inhibitions. Then there is the Feast of Fools, which was celebrated on Christmas Day until the time of Queen Elizabeth. This occasion was replete with the slinging of excrement, displays of transvestitism and a general sexual license, with all social classes joining in. Shocking to the civilized modern, it was considered by its participants no more than another holiday, very orgiastic hence very cathartic, and not taken in the least seriously. Perhaps the favorite sport, equivalent, say, to trimming the tree, was stripping down naked and going about the streets in a manure cart, pelting people with dung. Presumably it was done in the same high spirit of good fun as the snowballing of our own time. Everybody ducked, as they do today, and no one was offended, either at what was hurled or by the lewd postures effected by the cart riders. History is filled with similar festivals on this most cherished holiday, and all partook similarly of the salutary effects of expressed hysteria, harmless violence and sexual activity.

Let it not be thought that I am espousing a cause, as Freud once remarked at the conclusion of a lively chapter on perversion. I do not hanker for a return to those celebrations but, rather, to an approximation of the joyful spirit out of which they sprang.

We have a touch of it in the traditional, and much despised, Christmas office party, but it is only a touch, and it is weakening every year. An example of this decline may be seen in the Hollywood motion-picture studios. Ten years ago they all abandoned their We're-just-ordinary-folks pose and staged the wildest, most orgiastic day-before-Christmas parties one could hope for. At Universal-International, the Writers' Building, an otherwise grim edifice, somewhat reminiscent of San Quentin, became a palace of joy, or sin, depending upon your view of these things. Weary, bitter, frightened scenarists could be observed hooting down the halls after the same secretaries they'd worked with, and never noticed, for 364 days. Flinthearted producers offered seven-year contracts to girls who dreamed, but never really believed, that they would rise above their status as messengers. Actors told their directors what they really thought of them, and vice versa, whereupon they would exchange blows and then, usually, fall weeping into each other's arms, die best of friends. It was midnight, and the masks came off, for a little while. A few days later, of course, they were back on again; but there was a difference.

Now the masks stay on. At MGM last year, veteran studio employees were dismayed, as they had every right to be, by the following notice:

To all departments:

Any employee who is discovered to be in the possession of any alcoholic beverage whatsoever shall be subject to dismissal. this is a working day.

The day referred to was the day before Christmas.

And what is the foundation of our Christmas hebephrenia, our fear of parties, our inability to express those areas of ourselves that, psychologists insist, demand expression? Is it that we have mistaken the point of civilization and assumed it to mean the suppression of all natural tendencies?

I think so. I think that in this sophisticated age we have come to equate pleasure with sin and displeasure with virtue. It may be the heritage left us by the Puritan founders. To them, as we know, morality was a simple matter: the more difficult the task, the greater the benefit. Yet these good, gray Puritans did not originate the concept of die desirability of repressed emotions. It has been with us, to one degree or another, from the beginning; if it hadn't, there would have been no saturnalia, no orgies, no holidays, in the first place. They were instituted as corrective measures, meant to take care of the necessary imbalance we had imposed upon nature. If anyone is to blame, it's the serpent.

But I think we are taking the cure too far, making more of it than we have to. If we cannot follow Childe Harold's advice and "let joy be unconfined," at least we can let it out into the sunlight a few times a year. By all means let us make use of our inhibitions most of the time; it is through them that we have achieved the better part of our glory; but let us, for God's sake, understand that the greatest glory, as well as the lowest bestiality, comes of breaking through these inhibitions. The whole of art, at its highest, has been created by men who have chafed at their restrictions, burst free of them and felt fulfilled -- or, as it so often happened, burdened with guilt.

Guilt is the key, but we are applying it to the wrong door. Instead of feeling shame for what we did in our lost holidays, we should feel shame for not allowing the new generation the same privilege. They will die with regrets anyway, as people have done from the beginning of time, but the regrets will be over the things they have not done, and that is the worst feeling of all.

It is probably too late to prevent it from happening, but we could try.

We could turn the kids loose on Halloween and tell them not to show their faces in the house till after midnight; we could bring back firecrackers and brass bands; we could keep the girl children out of brassieres until they're ready for them and let the boys discover sex in their own time; and we could revive the institution of the unrestrained Christmas party.

Maybe the result would be that the kids, and we, ourselves, would simply be embarrassed; that we would realize we were trying to bring back, not a past era, nor some grand traditions, but our youth.

And maybe not.

A first, relatively easy step would be to halt the decline of Christmas in its classic form. Shake it loose from its current position as a status game and give it back to the kids. Forbid any Santa Claus to appear publicly before December 15, remembering that children can accommodate belief in the department-store variety along with belief in the real Saint Nick, if they're given half a chance. Ban all parades until a week before The Day. Arrange for the television set to break around November 30, with no hope of a repair job before January. Keep the presents well hidden and look annoyed when the children ask if you've been to the stores yet. Buy a gun and shoot to death the man who invented the aluminum Christmas tree. While you're at it, take care of those responsible for the homosexual greeting cards, the ads that urge you to give "the best gift of all -- money," the doll that wets her pants and throws up, the sexless Visible Man, and the $50 Nuclear Sub that "every kid on the block will have." Then throw the gun at the fellow who initiated the practice of sending out "personalized" cards with printed signatures.

Maybe if these things are done we'll be on the way to restoring the joy of holidays.

If not, then we shall be left with Thanksgiving, for which no thanksgiving is in order. It was always a day for grownups, offering the maximum of intake and the minimum of outgo; a day of industry for the women and indolence for the men; of sniffing and peering at deceased fowl; of greeting relatives; and, late in the afternoon, of sitting down to the big table and, hungry or no, consuming at least two platefuls of turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots and peas combined with white sauce, Brussels sprouts, biscuits and pumpkin pie. There may have been those who enjoyed the day, but they did not move in my set. To us it was a time of unspeakable boredom. We regarded school as only slightly less desirable, if for no other reason than that hating school was de rigueur. It was, however, an impersonal hatred; our parents weren't responsible; God, or the State, was. But we couldn't blame God or the State for Thanksgiving. There wasn't any law that forced us to bathe that morning, put on our newly cleaned and pressed Sunday best, shine our shoes, stay inside, chat with and play the piano for aunts and uncles and cousins we hadn't seen for a year and wouldn't recognize on the street, starve until four P.M., then stuff down a ton of food, most of which we didn't much like anyway. It was Mom and Dad who were responsible, and, since they seemed to be equally exhausted by the experience, we wondered why they subjected themselves to it. And so, probably, did they.

The answer is clear. The reason they subjected themselves to Thanksgiving, and die reason it endures, is that it allows a once-yearly excess -- gluttony -- for which payment, in the coin of tedium, can be made immediately before and after: sin and penance, all in the same 24-hour period.

But let us not despair. There's always St. Swithin's Day, Bastille Day, Guy Fawkes Day -- and those durable modern synthetics, Mother's Day and Father's Day. But, note well, no Children's Day.

Who first invented work, and bound the free

And holiday rejoicing spirit down...Charles Lamb