A Christmas Garland/Holly

There is a form of exclusion that is peculiar to one feast. Through the year you may garnish your house with the variable excess of its garden. "Fragrance is the wisdom of a room," it has been well said by a living poet. Not less does the room draw temperament from the colour of its flowers. And she is a foolish housewife who denies it the double attribute. Her task is of selection. Frost, rain, the diffusion or occultation of the sun's rays, the improvisable chances of climate, are the only arbiters of her material. The incident of Christmas is the check on her discrimination. In piety, she must reject from her house all plants, save some that are appropriate in usage. But not for long may the house keep its devotional look. Twice six days is the right span. Thereafter, the walls must be stripped. A strange bareness commemorates, not unduly, the term of the feast. The vases take back their complement of ordinary flowers, that seem, after the warmer symbols, to chill us with their unmeaning. It is not yet that we are recaptivated by their mere prettiness.

The inveterate power of holly is that we miss it. We feel when it is not there that the flat landscapes or uncomely forbears on the wall were dignified by its circumference. Nor had the orb of enspiced suet been tolerable but for its erect sprig. For the leaves had, in the dark radiance of their curves, their message of psychic joy, different for each one. Youths and maidens, it may well be, approve the pale plant that overhangs the bestowal of cursory salutes. But the child, yet unheedful of mature modes, cares rather for holly. To small fingers the keen points of the leaves yield their content of adventure. Never so clearly as at this season may we gauge the charm that peril has for immature minds. See the child as he snatches the dried grape from its enthralling flame! Poor is the reward of the palate. Nor does the hand, in its prehensibility, escape a sad charring. Yet does he persist. Under the same impulse, he inclines to holly, for the sake of the pain it holds in its symbolic spears. Holly has, too, in a greater or less degree, his dearest colour. He values the plant for its crude accompaniment of berries. But the good housewife will not regret the sparse incidence of these things, in whose plenty superstition sees the exact omen of an unkind season.