THE HOLIDAY PLAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 28, 5 January 1940, Page 42

THE HOLIDAY PLAN

Where Did You Go For Christmas?

HAT with one thing and, another-mostly streamers and crowded pavements and floods -the Christmas holiday idea had us before we knew where we were. Many of us, of course, had not attempted to keep it at bay-we'd given ourselves up to a welter of cards or cooking. We'd looked out all last year’s unused gifts and decided where they might be sent with safetyand dropped all the essential hints about 9ur own requirements. An odd hot day began the diverting game of accumulating a summer wardrobe. A week of drowning deluge thrust its importance temporarily aside. But the shops, crowded with the usual glitter of seductive but quite worthless objects which one gives and receives, insisted with relentless reiteration, " Christmas is a’comin’ in" .. . Well, and what did we do about it? Just for fun I went the rounds with the hackneyed question, " Where’re you going for Christmas?" * * * I climbed the stairs to a bindery stacked high with books and journals and pamphlets in the making. Great columns of paper partitioned us about and all but hid the workers at one end from those at the other. At a long trestle table, women and girls sorted and counted, sorted and counted, looked up to grin cheerfully but didn’t lose count. At a curiouslooking machine a girl sat working a treadle. Down came a steel arm and put in the clips-‘" clip, clip" — clip, clip.’ How many score to the minute I did not wait to count. " Whirr" when the belts that shot off counted sheaves in accurate numbers. " Zimm" went the guillotines and cut the great mountains of paper through like butter. * * * "Gloria" sat with her back to a window grinning widely. "Where’re you going Christmas?" I said.

"There'll only be Christmas Day and Boxing Day for us," she said. "I expect we'll laze in the morning and then go to the Exhibition. I’ve been-but once is no good-you need a few half days to see it all." "And Boxing Day?" "O, we're going cycling-Eastbourne probably. We'll swim and lie in the sun. We always do." " Who's ‘ we 997? " O- us — and, well, our boy friends,’ she added, rather shy. " Jolly," I said. " What do you wear?" "For cycling? O, shorts," said Gloria. " And sandshoes and socks with bare legs and wide hats for the sun." Her fingers never stopped feeding her machine, The belts were whirling her printed sheets away and folding them-once, twice, and again-then dropped them into neat piles. A paper crumpled. There was a jam and she switched off to tear away the bungled strip that was obstructing. She looked up at me with a half-shy toss of her dark bobbed hair. "T’ve got a new frock for Christmas Day," she said. "It’s nice." So’s Gloria, I thought, and, what’s more, she’s typical. i * * %* "Dulcie" was petite and blonde but her eyes were dark and roguish. She brushed the long runner that went the full length between the tables of the cafe. She whisked the day’s dust and crumbs first to one side, then to the other, as though it were part of the game of living and that was good fun. "Where’re you going Christmas?" I said out of the blue. Dulcie could never be disconcerted. She stopped whisking, straightened, leaned on her broom and looked at me with the roguish eye.

"Me? I’m going with an Army boy," she offered instantly, "and I don’t care where." " Just you?" I asked. "No -there’ll be a bundle of us," she said. " We'll have dinner at a pub-and a carand a cabaret. And we mean to have a good time." "What are you wearing?" "My new costume, of course, It’s small black and white check with a tiny hat-black with a veil. And I know three things I’m getting, too ...a purse (the kind you wear over your shoulder) a _ bottle of sherry and a tin of cigarettes. Leastways, I hope it’s a tin," she added. % ae * And for us all-or most of us- it was Christmas dinner, the traditional one, right through: to puddings and nuts and raisins. Funny-that. But after all, there’s nothing acutely festive in a tin of salmon, is there?