Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ > Books: christmas‎ (22)

Well, it makes us look like jerks, doesn’t it? A young reindeer is discriminated against up to and until he has marginal utility. I mean, really. Who looks good in that scenario? Not all of the other reindeer, who come across as bigots and bullies. And not Santa, who is implicitly tacit in reindeer bigotry.

"She had once possessed a certain style of beauty that would never wholly leave her and would never wholly return."

"Other men are leading exciting lives, but I – well, I’m just a small-town bank clerk. I never did anything really useful or interesting, and it looks as if I never will. I might just as well be dead. Sometimes I wish I were. In fact, I wish I’d never been born!”

When he found himself unable to find a publisher for his story, author Philip Van Doren Stern printed up copies of the “The Greatest Gift” and gave them out as Christmas cards in 1943. Eventually, the story came to the attention of director Frank Capra, who explained later, “It was the story I had been looking for all my life! A good man, ambitious. But so busy helping others, life seems to pass him by…Through the eyes of a guardian angel he sees the world as it would have been had he not been born."

"... I wish to say I always question his judgment in dancing so much with Miss Muriel O'Neill, who works in the Half Moon Night Club. And the reason I question his judgment in this respect is because everybody knows that Miss Muriel O'Neill is a doll who is very well thought of by Heine Schmitz, and Heine Schnitz is not such a guy as will take kindly to anybody dancing more than once and a half with a doll that he thinks well of."

It is a tragic hour, that h

It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition. To-night, as this man stood stranded in the streets of the city, his hour came. It was not the first time he had been hungry and desperate and alone. But always before there had been some outlook, some chance ahead, some pleasure yet untasted that seemed worth the effort, some face that he fancied was, or would be, dear. But it was not so to-night.

"It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s handwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled."

“Reverend Wall let a homeless man wait inside last week, and he relieved himself on the carpet in the adult Sunday School room. We had to have it cleaned.” She looked reprovingly at Sharon. “With these people, you can’t let your compassion get the better of you.”

No, Sharon thought. Jesus did, and look what happened to him.

He put down the book and raised his teacup in a toast. “To Sir Walter Scott, who knew how to keep Christmas!”

“And to Mr. Dickens,” Marley said, “the founder of the feast.”

“To books!” I said, thinking of Gemma and A Little Princess, “which instruct and sustain us through hard times.”

The sound of incredible, perfect harmony exploded in the church, booming from wall to wall with all the majesty the hymnist must have intended but which had never before been even remotely achieved at St. Phil’s. By the end of the first stanza, the choirmaster was gripping the lectern, his knuckles white. At the completion of the chorus, he waved the choir to a halt and staggered to a seat.

He knew what to do after that, and he did it, without any demur from the object of his admiration. He would like to have done more, but the winged harpy of good manners clattered into the room and flopped down to roost on his shoulder.