The Christmas MEGAPACK ®. Nina Kiriki Hoffman

account of my asthma. There were some others in the case—I imagine the proprietor of the shop put them in to make it look complete. For my part I think it is much more neat and proper to keep cigarettes in a real case than in a candy box under the bureau.” She spoke with silencing distinctness.

      “He sent me a lovely set of little crystal glasses, just for grape juice,” said Mrs. Alfred Dustan.

      “For grape juice,” echoed her son admiringly.

      “I think he’s in love,” announced Ethel, the sweetly sentimental high school girl. “He’s picked out the darlingest gifts for us girls this year—real Christmasy things, the kind nobody would ever buy for herself—and his presents before have been so—well, stodgy. I think love is opening his eyes to what a woman really needs.”

      “Oh, bubbles!” squealed one of the younger Dustans.

      The older members looked inquiringly at each other, as if wondering if there were something in that suggestion. Everybody carefully refrained from looking at Mrs. Marian Andrews, who flushed delicately under this absence of scrutiny.

      Mrs. Andrews was hardly a family connection, but in her girlhood, and later in her widowhood, she had made her home with a cousin who was one of the in-laws, and was a welcome guest at family parties.

      Her marriage was believed to be the reason why Edmund was a bachelor. Her widowhood was considered to open a door of opportunity that the family hoped he would enter. As a matter of fact, he had essayed to enter, but found the door firmly closed. Mrs. Marian liked Edmund, and respected him. Oh, yes, indeed! But some way he hardly seemed malleable, responsive, human enough to make an agreeable husband. But if he were in love with some other woman who only wanted his money and wouldn’t be good to him—really, that would not do at all.

      “What did he send you, Mrs. Andrews?” asked Estelle, mischievously.

      “Flowers, these,” replied Mrs. Andrews graciously, touching a spray of white lilacs.

      “Oh, how sweet!” cried Ethel, “the lilac means ‘my first love,’ doesn’t it?”

      “Really, I couldn’t say,” remarked Mrs. Andrews, rising. “Let’s put on a record while we are waiting for the others.” For there are occasions when one must do something.

      They did try one.

      The hilarious music filled the hall as Mr. Edmund Dustan entered. How unusually gay they sound, he thought. Mrs. Alfred Dustan accompanied him upstairs that he might pay his respects to Mme. Sarah, the matriarch of the clan. Madame was absorbed in a book. She kept her fingers in the place as she greeted her grandson.

      “I can hardly tear myself away from your gift,” she exclaimed. “Every one of those books is so interesting looking—this reminds me of one I was very fond of in youth, The Mysteries of Udolpho. I had begun to think there were no such books nowadays, most of those you have sent before have seemed rather uneventful. And those chocolate bonbons—I am fond of chocolate. I know old ladies are supposed to prefer peppermint—a flavor I detest. You were kind to take such pains to please your old grandmother, Edmund.”

      She pulled him toward her with her free hand, and pressed her tremulous old lips against his cheek. He left her room with a mist before his eyes, and a large question mark protruding from his skull.

      A bevy of laughing girls and boys surrounded him. “Oh, Uncle Edmund, my parasol is a love,” “And my vanity bag,” “Those cravats are corking, notice this one,” “Sportiest pictures I ever saw, I’m crazy about them,” “Oh, can you teach us the dance that goes with the last record we played?”

      In this new atmosphere of youthful appreciation, Mr. Edmund Dustan visibly expanded. Though his brain now bristled with question marks at the sight of the remarkable array of meretricious atrocities he was said to have presented, his tongue betrayed him not. He bided his time.

      “Uncle Edmund,” whispered Ethel twining her arm in his to hold him back from the others as they passed along the hall, “I had to tell Mrs. Andrews what those white lilacs meant that you sent her.”

      “Indeed!” said the stupefied Edmund.

      “I think it’s the sweetest kind of proposal I ever heard of—sending her the flower that means my first love. But it would have spoiled everything if she hadn’t understood, so I told her.”

      “And what did she say?” he murmured.

      “Nothing. But I caught her in the library looking up the language of flowers in a dictionary, to see if I was right. She blushed like anything when she saw me.”

      “Indeed!” said Edmund again. At this moment they were at the arched doorway of the old-fashioned parlor, and, catching a glimpse of the mistletoe over his head, he absent-mindedly kissed his silly little niece.

      The road downhill is known to be excessively slippery. Soon afterward he caught and kissed Aunt Martha. The house was filled with astounding hilarity.

      Later in the evening, in a secluded corner, he dared to touch a spray of lilac, and look into the beautiful eyes of Mrs. Marian Andrews.

      “You seem a different man this evening,” she said, with averted gaze.

      “But the same loyal love you have always known,” whispered Mr. Dustan, a trifle awkwardly. Then he gasped with delight, the lady had lifted to her smiling lips a bit of lilac bloom.

      Although it was perfectly indefensible for a stenographer to suppose that Mr. Dustan would write Jas. when he meant Jos., the error did not cause a poor working girl to lose her position.

      CAN’T SEE THE TREE FOR THE FOREST by Skadi meic Beorh

      Gone are the days of haggling; of sweetening the deal—the days when the sly car dealer would throw in a “fishing car” if you bought a brand new automobile from him. In this day and time, Savvy is the word, and no other, when you’re getting that beloved Christmas Tree. You have to be quicker, smoother, and harder then these quick, smooth and hard men selling Happy Holidays to you at a set price...set just as you step out of your vehicle.

      “Oh, I don’t pay too much attention to that,” the little wiry man replies to your question as to whether many people spend an hour or more looking for that perfect Tree. Do bear in mind this is after he’s mentioned that you’ve been there a really long time already. “I’m just here to satisfy,” he adds nonchalantly.

      “Well, I’m not satisfied yet,” you retort with a friendly smile and a wink. He takes leave of you then, asking over his shoulder for you to give him a holler when you’ve discovered the full, green beauty of your dreams. Those, of course, are your words, not his. He then spins on his heels and comes back to show you how to bend the needles to see if they have any life left in them. He doesn’t offer the following information, but to pointed query you find that the trees have been cut since the middle of November, and it’s already well into the second week of December. Thanking him for the inside info on the life expectancy of your Tannenbaum, you turn back, test a leaf as he has just shown you, and it pops between your fingers. You test seven other trees. They all pop. You love the advertised price for these gorgeous Virginia Pines; $14.95 (plus several dollars tax, of course). They smell wonderful, too, and you imagine your prize perfuming the air for the next month. Old-Tyme Christmas Cheer at fifty cents a day. Can’t beat that!

      You again begin to tromp around through slimy grass and mud; and you’re suddenly very glad you headed out before noon. How discombobulating it would be, you muse, to be out here beneath bright, 100-watt bulbs after dark, when all the trees look the same, or all look like one gargantuan and virtually unassailable Conifer Monstrosity. In the daytime, even if it’s cloudy, you can clearly see the grotesque yellowing of the particular needles, the great ugly holes that couldn’t possibly be filled with ornaments or lights of any flourish...and the ants.

      Ants? Not aphids? No. Well, there are aphids on some trees. Your tree last year had a few here and there, but a spritz or two of the ol’ anti-aphid formula got rid of them for the most part, and you were happy. But this