The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 8 (December 1, 1929)

The Spot Marked X-mas

The Spot Marked X-mas.

To all of us, Christmas Comes but Once a Year; it is the spot marked X-mas on the mental matrix; it is the cue to introduce the light comedy touch into twelve acts of dreary drama. But why wait until the fall of the curtain to put the laugh across the “lights”? Why not shoot up the Whole show with comic capers?

“Look after the laughs and the laments will take care of themselves,” should be our clarion cry. It should be our aim permanently to pulverise the populace with lashings of laughter, to minister to the masses with the microbes of merriment, to jollify the jeremiads with japes of joy, to pepper the pessimists with persiflage, and generally to wake the welkin with salvos of song. Such need not take the form of vocal vibration or laryngitical levity; it may be a silent song of the soul, an internal interlude—dumb but delicious, soundless but satisfying, a genuine generation of joy notes in the jazz organ.