Another Garland

As every schoolchild knows, G.K. Chesterton was a popular author and raconteur in early 20th-century England, a close friend of the estimable Hillaire Belloc. Shaw called them Chesterbelloc, and Belloc wrote this magnificent defense of Chesterton after he had been critized by an Oxford Don.

(Chesterton also had a cousin who was instrumental in far-right politics in England between the wars, Wikipedia covers him too.)

Anyway, here is Beerbohm, doing Chesterton, doing Christmas:

One [error about Christmas] is that Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation. This is (I admit) is quite a recent idea. It never entered into the tousled heads of the shepherds by night, when the light of the angel of the Lord shone about them and they arose and went to do homage to the Christ child. It never entered into the heads of the Three Wise Men. They did not bring their gifts as a joke, but as an awful oblation. It never entered into the heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of the Middle Ages. Looking back across the years they saw in that dark and ungarnished manger only a shrinking woman, a brooding man, and a child born to sorrow. The philomaths of the eighteenth century, looking back, saw nothing at all. It is not the least of the glories of the Victorian era that it rediscovered Christmas. It is not the least of the mistakes of the Victorian era that it supposed Christmas to be a feast.