Message from a past holiday can brighten the future

Thinking of the quaint old-timey Christmas card might be just the thing to help you be hopeful.

Editor’s note: This column appeared in the combined Dec. 25, 1971, The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution.

In recent days I’ve thought and read more about Christmas than I’ve done about Christmas. (When this sees print I may still be looking for that roll of ribbon I bought to put on those lumpy, funny-looking and excruciatingly plain packages.)

But there are great saving things to be gathered from reading and one that strengthens and comforts me here at the 11th hour is the 1881 Christmas card I saw in a book.

It hasn’t the first Christmasy item in the picture, which shows a woman and a little girl at one of those cute old-time Dutch doors. A vine twines over the door, flower pots bloom at the window and the little girl, clutching what appears to be a big straw hat with one hand, sprinkles grain to a passel of hens and biddies with the other.

The sentiment that went with this card was this: “When snow lies at Christmas and Grandpapa shivers — the children are bright; they, hopeful of pleasures the New Year may bring, look forward to feeding the chickens in the spring.”

It’s not exactly inspirational — but in a way it is. This is a good day for being hopeful about the pleasures the New Year may bring and looking forward to feeding the chickens or whatever else you have in mind for the spring. (Chickens happen to be on my agenda. One of the most attractive sights I see when I drive to work each morning is a flock of bright-plumaged and perky little bantams darting out from under a tangle of fence rose bushes by the Holbrooks’ house. So I’m thinking bantam thoughts for spring.)

Any way you look at it, it seems to me to be appropriate to think this day of the days ahead and somehow try to have some of Christmas’ special magical quality spill over into the rest of the year. One of my favorite Christmas cards said it better than I can. It was a handwritten note from Alyce and Remer Tyson and their two children and it read: “Love one another on Mondays

Tuesdays Wednesdays Thursdays

Fridays

Saturdays

Sundays, and

Have a Merry Christmas all year round!”

It’s easy to love one another on Christmas, but it’s those coming plain old worrisome weekends that are tough.

It’s easy to be merry — or a reasonable facsimile of same — on Christmas but that year ’round bit is harder.

So today while Grandpapa shivers, maybe remembering a quaint old-timey 1881 Christmas card will help some of do some forward-looking.

Celestine Sibley