Explore "Compliments of the Season" by O. Henry on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to very questionable sources -- facts and philosophy. We will begin with -- whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rattrap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.