The cake goes flat if even one ingredient is omitted. Of all the flavours perhaps the Essence of Goodfellowship (which includes “a thought for everybody”) is the most important. For Christmas is Christmas only if it brings man and man together. Christmas is a kind of sentimental Who's Who for re-binding threads of friendship which have become, if not broken, slightly frayed. For every thought which prompts a present or a token of re-membrance returns the sender a little slice of life buttered with Memory so that he partakes of a “return” of each course in Life's Bill o' Fare. And when Christmas thus has renovated all the threads of friendship he ties them neatly with the knot of Human Sympathy, without which Man's life is as bleak and barren to contemplate as a slate quarry to a schoolboy on holiday.