| O FRANKLY bald and obviously stout! | |
| And so you find that Christmas as a fête | |
| Dispassionately viewed, is getting out | |
| Of date. | |
| |
| The studied festal air is overdone; | 5 |
| The humour of it grows a little thin; | |
| You fail, in fact, to gather where the fun | |
| Comes in. | |
| |
| Visions of very heavy meals arise | |
| That tend to make your organism shiver; | 10 |
| Roast beef that irks, and pies that agonise | |
| The liver; | |
| |
| Those pies at which you annually wince, | |
| Hearing the tale how happy months will follow | |
| Proportioned to the total mass of mince | 15 |
| You swallow. | |
| |
| Visions of youth whose reverence is scant, | |
| Who with the brutal verve of boyhood's prime | |
| Insist on being taken to the pant- | |
| -omime. | 20 |
| |
| Of infants, sitting up extremely late, | |
| Who run you on toboggans down the stair; | |
| Or make you fetch a rug and simulate | |
| A bear. | |
| |
| This takes your faultless trousers at the knees, | 25 |
| The other hurts them rather more behind; | |
| And both effect a fracture in your ease | |
| Of mind. | |
| |
| My good dyspeptic, this will never do; | |
| Your weary withers must be sadly wrung! | 30 |
| Yet once I well believe that even you | |
| Were young. | |
| |
| Time was when you devoured, like other boys, | |
| Plum-pudding sequent on a turkey-hen; | |
| With cracker-mottos hinting of the joys | 35 |
| Of men. | |
| |
| Time was when 'mid the maidens you would pull | |
| The fiery raisin with profound delight; | |
| When sprigs of mistletoe seemed beautiful | |
| And right. | 40 |
| |
| Old Christmas changes not! Long, long ago | |
| He won the treasure of eternal youth; | |
| Yours is the dotage—if you want to know | |
| The truth. | |
| |
| Come, now, I'll cure your case, and ask no fee:— | 45 |
| Make others' happiness this once your own; | |
| All else may pass: that joy can never be | |
| Outgrown! | |
