By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock
of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and
10's were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to
rub them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers
design us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to
the time we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of
meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they
were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so
inadequate to the festival.

This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance
and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists have
nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide convention.
After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we have found
not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of the true
romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies around
us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs in
snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what has a
blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug of
mulled claret. Now these things are merry enough in their way, or they
were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in
Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and
circumstance that surround us to-day. Is not a commuter's train, stalled
in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?
Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket
of golden light? Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and
holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer? Root beer may be but meager
flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate 'tis honest, 'tis