i remember that we boys used to argue as to which was better, summer or winter. each season had its special charms, and each was welcome after the other one had run its course. one reason why we were never sure which was best was that christmas came in winter and fourth of july in summer. there were other lesser holidays that counted little with the boy. there was thanksgiving; but ours was a village of new england people, and thanksgiving was largely a religious day. the church-bells always rang on thanksgiving, although usually we were not compelled to go to meeting. then, too, thanksgiving was the day for family reunions. our aunts and uncles and grandfathers and grandmothers came to take dinner with us, or we went to visit them; and we had to comb our hair and dress up, and be told how we had grown, and how much we looked like our father or our 194mother or our aunt, or some other member of the family; and altogether the day was about as stupid as sunday, and we were glad when it was over.
then there was new year’s day; but this was of little use. no one paid much attention to new year’s, and generally the people worked that day the same as any other. sometimes a belated christmas present was left over to new year’s day, and we always had a lingering expectation that we might get something then, although our hopes were not strong enough to warrant hanging up our stockings again. washington’s birthday was of no account whatever, and in those days lincoln’s birthday and labor-day had not yet been made holidays. we managed to get a little fun out of april fool’s day, but this was not a real holiday, for school kept that day.
but christmas and fourth of july were really made for boys. no one thought of working on these days, and even my father did not make us study then. christmas was eagerly looked forward to while it was still a long way off, and a good many of the boys and girls believed in santa claus. all the 195children had heard the story, but my parents always told us it was not true, and we knew that santa claus was really our father and mother, or sometimes our uncles and aunts and grandparents, and people like that. of course we hung up our stockings; all boys and girls did that. we went to bed early at night and got up early in the morning, and after comparing our presents at home we started out through the neighborhood to see what the other boys and girls had got. then there was the christmas-tree in the evening at the church. this was one occasion when there was no need to make us go to church; and we all got a little paper horn of candy, or a candy cane, or some such treasure, plucked fresh from the green tree among the little lighted wax candles stuck on every branch. all day long on christmas we could slide down hill or skate, and sometimes we even had a new pair of skates or a sled for a present. altogether christmas was a happy day to us children.
of course there were some boys and girls who got very little at christmas, and some who got nothing at all, and these must have grieved a great deal; and i wondered not a little why 196it was that things were so uneven and unfair. i know now that it was cruel that this knowledge could not have been kept from the little child until he had grown better able to know and understand. i also realize that even to my parents, who were not the very poorest, with so many children christmas must have meant a serious burden both for what they gave and what they could not give, and that my mother must have denied herself many things that she should have had, and my father must have been compelled to forego many books that would have brought him comfort and consolation for his buried hopes.
as i have grown older, and have seen christmas-giving develop into a duty and a burden, and often a burden hard to bear, i have come to believe less and less in this sort of indiscriminate matter-of-course gift-making. if one really wishes to make a present, it should be offered freely from the heart as well as from the hand, and given without regard to christmas day. with care and thoughtfulness on the part of parents, almost any day could be a holiday to little children, and they would soon forget that “christmas comes but once a year.”
but, after all, i think the boys of my time liked the fourth of july better than christmas day. this was no doubt largely due to the fact that children love noise. they want “something doing,” and the fourth of july somehow satisfies this desire more than any other day. then we boys ourselves had a great deal to do with the fourth of july. in fact, there could not have been a real fourth without our effort and assistance. as on christmas eve, we went to bed early without protest on the night before the fourth,—so early that we could not go to sleep, and would lie awake for hours wondering if it were not almost time for the fourth to begin. we always started the celebration before daylight. the night before, we had put our dimes and pennies together and bought all the powder we could get the stores to sell us; and then the blacksmith’s boy had a key to the shop,—and, anyhow, his father was very “clever” to us boys. by the help of this boy we unlocked the door, took out the anvils, and loaded them on a wagon. we got a little charcoal stove from the boy whose father had a tin-shop, and with it a long rod of iron; and then we started 198out, before day had dawned, to usher in the fourth. we drew the anvils up and down the road, stopping particularly before the houses where we knew that we would not be welcome. then we unloaded one anvil, turned it upside down, filled the little square hole in the bottom level full of powder, put a damp paper over this, and a little trail of powder to the edge, and put the other anvil on top; then the bravest boy took the rod of iron, one end of which had been heated in the charcoal stove, and while the rest of us put our fingers in our ears and ran away, he boldly touched off the trail of powder,—and a mighty roar reverberated down the valley and up the sides of the hills to their very crests.
after saluting the citizens whom we especially wished to favor or annoy, we went to the public square and fired the anvils until day began to break, and then we turned home and crawled into our beds to catch a little sleep before our services should be needed later on.
it was generally eight or nine o’clock before we got our hurried breakfast and met again at the public square. we visited the shops and stores, and went up to the little knots of men 199and women to hear what they had to say about the cannonading, and intimated very broadly that we could tell who did it if we only would. then we lighted our bits of punk and began the fusillade of fire-crackers that was next in order on our programme. at this time the cannon fire-cracker, with all its terrors, had not come; and though here and there some boy had a small cannon or a pistol, the noise was confined almost entirely to fire-crackers. most of us had to be very saving of them; they were expensive in those days, and our funds were low especially after the heavy firing in the early hours. we always felt that it was not fair that we should be obliged to get up before daylight in the morning and do the shooting, and buy the powder too, and once or twice we carried around a subscription paper to the business-men to raise funds for the powder; but this met with poor success. farmington never was a very public-spirited place.
there were always plenty of boys who could shoot a fire-cracker and hold it in their hands until it went off, and now and then one who could hold it in his teeth with his eyes shut tight. but this last exploit was considered 200dangerous, and generally was done only on condition that we gave a certain number of fire-crackers to the boy who took the risk. while we were all together, to hear someone else shoot fire-crackers was a very different thing from shooting them yourself. although you did nothing but touch the string to a piece of lighted punk and throw the fire-cracker in the air, it sounded better when you threw it yourself than when some other boy threw it in your place.
often on the fourth of july we had a picnic in the afternoon, and sometimes a ball-game too. this, of course, was in case it did not rain; rain always stopped everything, and it seemed as if it always did rain on the fourth. some people said this was because so much powder was exploded; but it could not be so, because it generally rained on picnic days whether it was the fourth or not. and then on saturday afternoons, at the time of our best base-ball matches, it often rained; and this even after we had gone to the neighboring town, or their boys had come to visit us. in fact, rain was one of the crosses of our young lives. there was never any way of knowing whether it would come or not; but there it was, always hanging above our heads like the famous sword of damascus—or some such man—that our teachers told us was suspended by a hair. of course, when we complained and were rebellious about the rain our parents told us that if it did not rain we should have no wheat or corn, and everything would dry up, and all of us would starve; but these were only excuses,—for why could it not rain on sunday, when there was nothing to do and no one to be harmed? besides, there were six other days in the week besides saturday, and only one holiday in the whole long summer; and how could there be any use of making it rain on those days?
another thing that caused us a good deal of annoyance was that fourth of july and christmas sometimes came on sunday. of course, either a saturday or a monday was usually chosen in its place; but this was not very satisfactory, as some of the people would celebrate on saturday, and some on monday,—and, besides, we could not have a “truly fourth” on any day except the fourth.
when we had a “celebration,” it was generally in the afternoon, and was held in a 202grove beside the river below the town. everyone went to the celebration, not only in farmington but in all the country round. on that day the brass-band came out in its great four-horse wagon, and the members were dressed in uniform covered with gold braid. some of them played on horns almost as long and as big as themselves; and i thought that if i could only be a member of the band and have one of those big horns, i should feel very proud and happy. there was always someone there to sell lemonade, which looked very nice to us boys, although we hardly ever had a chance to get any after the powder and the fire-crackers had been bought. there were swings, and things like that; but they were not much fun, for there were so many boys to use them, and, besides, the girls had to have the swings most of the time, and all we could do was to swing them.
then we had dinner out of a basket. we always thought that this would be a great deal of fun; but it never was. the main thing that everyone carried to the dinner was cold chicken, and i hated chicken; and even if i managed to get something else, it had been 203smeared and covered over with chicken gravy, and wasn’t fit to eat,—and then, too, the butter was melted and ran over everything, and was more like grease than butter. besides, there were bugs and flies and mosquitoes getting into everything, to say nothing of the worms and caterpillars that dropped down off the trees or crawled up on the tablecloth. i never could see any fun in a basket picnic, even on the fourth of july.
after we were through with our dinners, squire allen came on the platform with the speaker of the day. the first thing squire allen did was to put on his gold spectacles; then he took a drink of water from a pitcher that stood on a stand on the platform; then he came to the front of the platform and said: “friends and fellow-citizens: the exercises will begin by reading the declaration of independence.” then he began to read, and it seemed as if he never would finish. of course i knew nothing about the declaration of independence, and neither did the other boys. we thought it was something squire allen wrote, because he always read it, and we did not think anyone else could read the declaration 204of independence. we all came up quite close and kept still when he began to read, but we never stood still until he got through. and we never had the least idea what it was about. all i remember is the beginning, “when in the course of human events”; and from what i have learned since i think this is all that anyone knows about the declaration of independence,—or, for that matter, all that anyone cares.
when squire allen finally got through the reading, he introduced the speaker of the day. this was always some lawyer who came from warner, the county-seat, twenty miles away. i had seen the lawyer’s horse and buggy at the hotel in the morning, and i thought how nice they were, and how much money a lawyer must make, and what a great man he was, and how i should like to be a lawyer; and i wondered what one had to study to be a lawyer, and how long it took, and how much brains, and a lot of things of this sort. the lawyer never seemed to be a bit afraid to stand up there on the platform before the audience, and i remember that he wore nice clothes,—a good deal nicer than those of the farmers and 205other people who came to hear him talk,—and his boots looked shiny, as if they had just been greased. he talked very loud, and seemed to be mad about something, especially when he spoke of the war and the “bridish,” and he waved his hands and arms a great deal, and made quite a fuss about it all. i know that he said quite a lot about the declaration of independence, and a lot about fighting, and how glorious it was; and told us all about europe and asia and africa, and how poor and downtrodden and ignorant all those people were, and how free we were, all on account of the declaration of independence, and the flag, and the g. a. r., and because our people were such good fighters. he told us that whatever happened, we must stand by the declaration of independence and the flag, and be ready to fight and to die if we ever had a chance to fight and die. and the old farmers clapped their hands and nodded their heads, and said he was a mighty smart man, and a great man, and thoroughly patriotic, and as long as we had such men the country was safe; and we boys went away feeling as if we wanted to fight, and wondering why the people in 206other countries ever let the rulers run over them the way they did, and feeling sorry they were so poor and weak and cowardly, and hoping we could get into a war with the “bridish” and help to free her poor ignorant serfs, and wondering if we were old enough to be taken if we did have a war, and wishing if we did that the lawyer could be the general, or the president, or anything else, for he certainly was a great man and could talk louder than anyone we had ever heard. i usually noticed that the lawyer was running for some office in the fall, and everyone said that he was just the man that we ought to have,—he was such a great patriot.
after the speech was over we went home to supper; and after dark, to the square to see the fireworks. this was a fitting close to a great day. we always noted every stage of preparation. we knew just how they put up the platform, and how they fixed the trough for the sky-rockets. we knew who touched them off, who held the roman candles, and who started the pin-wheels, and just what they all cost. we sat in wonder and delight while the pin-wheels and roman candles were going through their performance; but when the sky-rockets were touched off, we watched them until they exploded in the air, and then raced off in the darkness to find the sticks.
after the fireworks we slowly went home. although it had been a long day since we began shooting the anvils in the gray morning, it was hard to see the fourth actually over. take it all together, we agreed that the fourth of july was the best day of all the year.
