The Feast of St. Friend | Page 7

tarnished, like the great and like the simple, to whom it is quite
unnecessary to offer a defence and explanation of Christmas or to
suggest the basis of a new faith therein.

FIVE
DEFENCE OF FEASTING

And now I can hear the superior sceptic disdainfully questioning: "Yes,
but what about the orgy of Christmas? What about all the eating and
drinking?" To which I can only answer that faith causes effervescence,
expansion, joy, and that joy has always, for excellent reasons, been
connected with feasting. The very words 'feast' and 'festival' are
etymologically inseparable. The meal is the most regular and the least
dispensable of daily events; it happens also to be an event which is in
itself almost invariably a source of pleasure, or, at worst, of satisfaction:
and it will continue to have this precious quality so long as our souls
are encased in bodies. What could be more natural, therefore, than that
it should be employed, with due enlargement and ornamentation, as the
kernel of the festival? What more logical than that the meal should be
elevated into a feast?
"But," exclaims the superior sceptic, "this idea involves the idea of
excess!" What if it does? I would not deny it! Assuredly, a feast means
more than enough, and more than enough means excess. It is only
because a feast means excess that it assists in the bringing about of
expansion and joy. Such is human nature, and it is the case of human
nature that we are discussing. Of course, excess usually exacts its toll,
within twenty-four hours, especially from the weak. But the benefit is
worth its price. The body pays no more than the debt which the soul
has incurred. An occasional change of habit is essential to well-being,
and every change of habit results in temporary derangement and
inconvenience.
Do not misunderstand me. Do not push my notion of excess to
extremes. When I defend the excess inevitably incident to a feast, I am
not seeking to prove that a man in celebrating Christmas is entitled to
drink champagne in a public restaurant until he becomes an object of
scorn and disgust to the waiters who have travelled from Switzerland in
order to receive his tips. Much less should I be prepared to justify him
if, in his own home, he sank lower than the hog. Nor would I
sympathetically carry him to bed. There is such a thing as excess in
moderation and dignity. Every wise man has practised this. And he
who has not practised it is a fool, and deserves even a harder name. He
ought indeed to inhabit a planet himself, for all his faith in humanity

will be exhausted in believing in himself. * * * So much for the feast!
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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