I select at random two of the more obvious fallacies that obtain.  One is that Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation.  This is (I admit) quite a recent idea.  It never entered into the tousled heads of the shepherds by night, when the light of the angel of the Lord shone about them and they arose and went to do homage to the Child.  It never entered into the heads of the Three Wise Men.  They did not bring their gifts as a joke, but as an awful oblation.  It never entered into the heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of the Middle Ages.  Looking back across the years, they saw in that dark and ungarnished manger only a shrinking woman, a brooding man, and a child born to sorrow.  The philomaths of the eighteenth century, looking back, saw nothing at all.  It is not the least of the glories of the Victorian Era that it rediscovered Christmas.  It is not the least of the mistakes of the Victorian Era that it supposed Christmas to be a feast.

The splendour of the saying, “I have piped unto you, and you have not danced; I have wept with you, and you have not mourned” lies in the fact that it might have been uttered with equal truth by any man who had ever piped or wept.  There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.  At a funeral, the slightest thing, not in the least ridiculous at any other time, will convulse us with internal laughter.  At a wedding, we hover mysteriously on the brink of tears.  So it is with the modern Christmas.  I find myself in agreement with the cynics in so far that I admit that Christmas, as now observed, tends to create melancholy.  But the reason for this lies solely in our own misconception.  Christmas is essentially a dies irae.  If the cynics will only make up their minds to treat it as such, even the saddest and most atrabilious of them will acknowledge that he has had a rollicking day.

This brings me to the second fallacy.  I refer to the belief that “Christmas comes but once a year.”  Perhaps it does, according to the calendar—­a quaint and interesting compilation, but of little or no practical value to anybody.  It is not the calendar, but the Spirit of Man that regulates the recurrence of feasts and fasts.  Spiritually, Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a week.  When we have frankly acknowledged this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realise the Day’s mystical and terrific beauty.  For it is only every-day things that reveal themselves to us in all their wonder and their splendour.  A man who happens one day to be knocked down by a motor-bus merely utters a curse and instructs his solicitor, but a man who has been knocked down by a motor-bus every day of the year will have begun to feel that he is taking part in an august and soul-cleansing ritual.  He will await the diurnal stroke of fate with the same lowly and pious joy as animated the Hindoos awaiting Juggernaut.  His bruises will be decorations, worn with the modest pride of the veteran.  He will cry aloud, in the words of the late W.E.  Henley, “My head is bloody but unbowed.”  He will add, “My ribs are broken but unbent.”