(11/13) Celebrations at Thrush Green Read Online Free PDF Page B

the green preparations were going on with increasing fervour as the December days were torn from the calendar.
    Winnie Bailey was debating whether to send tights or hankies to her Australian cousins, mindful of postage expense.
    Ella Bembridge was hand-blocking some material, which was destined to be made into ties for her unlucky male relations. The recipients, however, were quite used to these annual gifts, and passed them on, after a decent interval, to bazaars some distance from Thrush Green.
    Nelly Piggott had cleared away the supper dishes, and was settling down at the table to write Christmas cards. Albert was next door at the Two Pheasants, and Nelly had time to sort robins from snowy churches, cats in bobble-hats from reindeer, in readiness for posting to friends and relations.
    Joan and Edward Young, the local architect, who lived in the finest of all the Cotswold houses on the green, were planning a Christmas party for their schoolboy son, and Harold and Isobel Shoosmith were sorting out their bottles of wine and making a list for more.
    But it was at Thrush Green school that the most intense of Christmas preparations were in force.
    Alan Lester had decided to keep things as simple as possible. The decorating of the three classrooms would be left to the care of the teacher in charge, and Miss Robinson, across the playground in the infants' room, was already supervising the construction of yards of paperchains, a Christmas frieze to encircle the walls, and some individual cracker cases, destined for unsuspecting parents, and waiting to be filled with wrapped boiled sweets generously supplied by the enthusiastic Miss Robinson.
    The paperchains and frieze were roaring ahead with little difficulty, but the cracker cases were decidedly less simple than The Teachers' World diagram had shown, and infant tears had spotted many a piece of scarlet crêpe paper. In fact, Miss Robinson had almost decided to scrap that particular project and substitute nice plain squares of red paper which could be drawn up round the sweets and turned into a neat dolly bag with the aid of sensible and obliging wire tie closures.
    The young probationer in the room next to Alan's had also embarked on an ambitious frieze showing angels with detachable wings which, in theory, fluttered in any light breeze available. It was a pretty notion on paper, but when transposed to practical hand work was far from successful. The Cotswold winds in winter are rough and rude, and at every opening of the classroom door the wings fell to the floor like confetti.
    When Alan Lester discovered his assistant one playtime tearfully trying to stick back the recalcitrant wings, he suggested that these tiresome appendages should go into the wastepaper basket, and that wings could be added on each side of the figures quite effectively by drawing on the black background with white chalk.
    'Much better,' agreed the girl, cheering up.
    'You don't want to be too ambitious,' said Alan kindly.
    'I thought of making some paper bells but they look rather tricky,' she admitted.
    'What about paperchains?'
    'But they always have paperchains!' protested the innovator.
    'That's why they like them,' Alan assured her.
    His own classroom was adorned with cardboard models of Father Christmas in his sleigh with rather weak-kneed reindeer pulling it. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the children were enchanted with their efforts. Here, too, paperchains stretched overhead, and when a link occasionally gave way and there was a cascade of bright chains upon the heads beneath, it all added to the festive spirit.
    The two older classes combined to practise carols, for it was in the school's tradition to take part in a carol service at St Andrew's on the green close by. The infants were exempt from this event, as excitement and nervousness had often brought tears, or worse, to the occasion, to the embarrassment of all present. They had a story read to them in the familiar comfort of