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Updated: June 26, 2025
The week following Christmas will be one dizzy round of parties and teas for the visitors, and Homeburg will be a delightful place full of the friends of boyhood, with an average of one reunion every fifteen minutes in and out of business hours. But on Christmas Day nothing will happen except the dinner. We'll get our presents in the morning, and then at noon the great crisis will come.
Wimble Horn said to Mrs. Ackley over the line which made Mrs. Ackley so mad that the two haven't spoken for three years. She knows just who of our citizens telephone to Paynesville when Homeburg goes dry, and order books, shoes, eggs, and hard-boiled shirts from the saloons up there to be sent by express in a plain package.
I've thought sometimes of buying one myself, but I don't believe it would be right. If I had a car myself, I would have to neglect all the others. It wouldn't do. Besides, I like to be peculiar. Is every one in Homeburg a millionaire? Goodness, no! Our brag is that we have less people per automobile than any other town, but then that's the ordinary brag with an Illinois small town.
He has been over to Paynesville and back. This is only twenty miles, but owing to the juicy and elusive condition of the roads, his rear wheels have traveled upward of two thousand miles in negotiating the distance and he has worn out two rear casings. Right here I wish to state that Homeburg roads are not always muddy.
When the automobile came, and when two moving picture theaters, a Chautauqua, and a Lyceum course opened fire in one year, and the business men fitted up a club with an ancient pool table in it, Homeburg got chummy with all the evening hours, and kicked so hard about the electric lights going off at midnight that the company had to run them an hour longer.
On the other hand, the nicest part of our Homeburg Christmas is the fact that, when we fold our tired hands over our bulging vests after dinner and lie down to rest, we know that there is no starving family in Homeburg which has had to celebrate Christmas by taking on an extra drink of water and indulging in a long, succulent sniff at a restaurant door.
You've made it as nice for me as any two magicians could have done, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But it's my last Christmas in New York, I hope. Next month the wife and children come on, and by next Christmas, if I have any luck at all, we'll join the happy army that swoops down on Homeburg for the holidays. My, but it will be funny to look at the old town from the outside in!
Homeburg has twenty-five hundred people and one hundred machines, counting Sim Askinson's old one-lunger and Red Nolan's refined corn sheller, which he built out of the bone-yard back of Gayley's garage. That's one for every twenty-five people. It only gives each auto five members of the family and twenty citizens to haul around. We're about up to the limit.
Maybe she's waiting alone because some other girl was handier in the new place. And maybe it wasn't a case of wait at all, only the boy who went away looked better to some Homeburg girl than any of those who stayed at home. That was the case with Sam Flanburg and Minnie Briggs a few years ago. Sam is on the Chicago Board of Trade and is one of our old-time boys.
Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come home tired and muddy in the gray dawn after a fire and demand hot coffee from their admiring women-folks; and as for the Homeburg girls well, the greatest social function of our town, or of the county for that matter, is the annual ball of the Homeburg fire department.
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