Happiness.

TO an OLD FOGEY (WHO CLAIMS 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!

Sir Owen Seaman

Thanks to Kurt for the image.