Truth THE NATIONAL PAPER THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1929. Why Are We So Serious?

NZ Truth, Issue 1205, 3 January 1929, Page 4

Truth THE NATIONAL PAPER THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1929. Why Are We So Serious?

♦ WHY must we be so miserable, so very serious about, ourselves and our fun. ? b Each Christmas Eve--.- "which passes, every New Year's' night that hands its mace over to the infant year m the cradle, finds us gloomily pacing along the city streets, our false noses awry, our low - vaudeville hats perched slovenly on our weary heads, as we try. to lash ourselves into making believe what hard shots we are. , . .We tramp along, screAV our noses into shop window's which frankly stifle our interest, perspire with Our fellows through the avenues of fetid shops, seeing nothing, yet struggling through because we haye done it on every twenty-fourth day of the last month m the year, and because, m the phraseology of some people, it is DONE, y 'know. Queer form of ' festivity, isn't it. And when we have struggled through ' the press of those who also DO these things, we turn about and do it all over again — because it looks very jolly, but we know it isn't, really. Is it traditional, this gloomy meandering, this aimless dodging of other's who really are bored, but who feel impelled to follow our strajght-laced examples? No wonder Continental peoples, call -us "Those phlegmatic Britishers!" b One expects a little sane madness, as it were, at Christmas and New Year, that our prosaic lives shall be a little more helterskelter, much more carnival than jth'rough the working*, span of the year, but the delightful spirit of unloosed heartstrings and enjoyment let 'free seems to be lacking m our jollifications. "We make too great an endeavor to be cheerful, instead of simply BEING cheerful. Let us be happy, then,' without looking so bored about it. Smiles never were meant to be so painful,, surely!