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But the accompaniments of the feast are also excessive.  For example, you make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a pistol.  You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap, which you put on your head to the end of looking foolish.  And this ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse is lying by every plate.  Surely no man in his senses, no woman in hers, would, etc., etc. * * *!  But one of the spiritual advantages of feasting is that it expands you beyond your common sense.  One excess induces another, and a finer one.  This acceptance of the ridiculous is good for you.  It is particularly good for an Anglo-Saxon, who is so self-contained and self-controlled that his soul might stiffen as the unused limb of an Indian fakir stiffens, were it not for periodical excitements like that of the Christmas feast.  Everybody has experienced the self-conscious reluctance which precedes the putting on of the cap, and the relief, followed by further expansion and ecstasy, which ensues after the putting on.  Everybody who has put on a cap is aware that it is a beneficial thing to put on a cap.  Quite apart from the fact that the mysterious and fanciful race of children are thereby placated and appeased, the soul of the capped one is purified by this charming excess.

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And the Tree!  What an excess of the fantastic to pretend that all those glittering balls, those coloured candles and those variegated parcels are the blossoms of the absurd tree!  How excessively grotesque to tie all those parcels to the branches, in order to take them off again!  Surely, something less medieval, more ingenious, more modern than this could be devised—­if symbolism is to be indulged in at all!  Can you devise it, O sceptical one, revelling in disillusion?  Can you invent a symbol more natural and graceful than the symbol of the Tree?  Perhaps you would have a shop-counter, and shelves behind it, so as to instill early into the youthful mind that this is a planet of commerce!  Perhaps you would abolish the doggerel of crackers, and substitute therefor extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin!  Perhaps you would exchange the caps for blazonry embroidered with chemical formula, your object being the advancement of science!  Perhaps you would do away with the orgiastic eating and drinking, and arrange for a formal conversation about astronomy and the idea of human fraternity, upon strictly reasonable rations of shredded wheat!  You would thus create an original festival, and eliminate all fear of a dyspeptic morrow.  You would improve the mind.  And you would avoid the ridiculous.  But also, in avoiding the ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply and hopelessly!  And think how your very original festival would delight the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality of the formal conversation!