inspiration of the name while playing Santa Claus with the little tots
of the household and pretending to have slid down the chimney without
getting a speck of soot on his bulging vestments.

Perhaps he imagined, while mother woke the children and had them peek
through a "crack in the door" at the white whiskered visitor stuffing
their stockings full of presents, that he had tethered his prancing
team of reindeer to a holly tree outside. Certainly there seemed to
have been material for such imagination, for tradition said that the
hill on which the first houses of the first settlement were built had
at one time been richly adorned with a species of American Ilex, and
even now there remained here and there carefully preserved remnants of
that reported original wealth of the wilderness.

Whether or not this conjectural history of the settlement had anything
to do with the cheerful mid-winter holiday developments of the
community need not be argued at length. An argument would render the
truth flat and insipid if it should prove to be in accord with poetic
tradition. So what's the use?

In mid-winter everybody just knew that Hollyhill as a child had been
nursed in the snow trimmed evergreen lap of Christmas. Not that this
municipality had a corner on mid-winter holiday generosity to the
exclusion of all other communities. The chief outstanding fact in this
relation was that the inhabitants, or those so fortunate as to be in a
position to give and receive abundantly, believed Hollyhill to be the
most generous Christmas town on earth, and there was nobody
sufficiently interested to make a denial and follow it up with proof.

Much of the credit for this condition was due to the leading man of