On Buying Books for Christmas

You are walking down the aisle of a large department store, when suddenly there looms before you the book department.

Your foot halts automatically, as it were, and conveys to your brain a thought.

"Ha!" you exclaim, inwardly. "Books! I hadn't thought of books. Why, I can give books to all those people I couldn't find things for."

You walk around the counters, pick up one book aimlessly, turn the leaves of another, are arrested by the brilliant cover on a third, and at last consult your list of friends and relatives.

"There's Uncle Jim. I'll send him that nice large book there, with coarse print and the pictures." So “Airplane Travels in Foreign Lands" is laid aside for Uncle Jim, an old country gentleman of eighty, with one foot in the grave.

“I haven't bought anything for Cousin Tom yet. I'll get him that last new novel of Ethel M. Dell." And Cousin Tom, who would have been raised to the seventh heaven by a work

on engineering, is settled.

“There's a new edition of Browning's poems. I'll send that to Daisy Lee." Daisy is a little butterfly of a girl, who probably never heard of Browning.

A volume of fairy tales is selected for little Margaret, whose mother disapproves of anything but solid fact. A book on art and artists speeds on its way to Sarah Jane, whose heart is bound up in domestic science. "The Psychology of Childhood" is sent to Miss Analy, who has retired from teaching after forty years of it, and hopes never to hear the word "teach" again.

A notice "Subscriptions Received Here for All Magazines" catches your eye, and you do one really sane thing: subscribe to a group of magazines for a family of relatives. These are 80 assorted, that among them everyone is sure to be pleased.

Had you thought before-hand of giving books, you might have made your giving a delight to yourself and to your friends. For nothing is so fine and friendly a gift as a book, or set of books, if you know the recipient's needs, likes and abominations, or better still, his dreams.

For books at Christmas, like other gifts, should not be really necessary, unless that in itself would be the greatest kindness, but should seek to bring an unexpected joy, an added touch of Christmas happiness, joining the pleasure in the book itself, with the blessedness of knowing that the friend who gives it realizes what you love, deep in your heart, and takes delight in satisfying you, in what measure he can.

-Edith G. Hawkes.

Included in "Class of 1891: Granger, Edith" - Classes of 1891-1900 records, Smith College Archives, CA-MS-01022, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts.