Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 303, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 December 1915 — USEFUL GIFTS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

USEFUL GIFTS

P— PEOPLE who dedide to give I only useful Christmas gifts KgjJ often have a bunch of surprises waiting fob them around the corner. '

“Look before you leap,” is A useful thing to remember. \ Useful presents should be accepted, in the spirit in which they are| given. Keep the Christmas spirit green. When you get a useful present, do not take it back and exchange it for something you can use. Keep it; hang on to it.' Do not give it away to the poor, for they have troubles enough of their own. One of the most useful useful gifts —for some people—is a smoking jacket. Once we gave our old Uncle Peters one of those costly nicotine reefers. It had blue satin cuffs and a braided collar. The coat was held together not by buttons but by goldbraid knots. The garment made a hit with Uncle Peters, but not the knots. For years his smoking jacket had been a flannel undershirt, gracefully decorated with suspenders. Every eve ning he sat by the stove, smoking a pipe which would have suffocated a steamship stoker. He never told us what he burned in the pipe, and we

never went close enough to investigate. Christmas day they made him put on Qie smoking jacket. Life was not the sarhe after that. They told him he mustn’t smoke that vulgar, shocking old pipe while wearing the lovely jacket. Everybody thought he was cured of the deadly corncob. He quit smoking the pipe, and instead brought home a bale of cigars. He made a handsome figure, wearing the braided smoking jacket, and puffing a cigar with a gilt band around it. We left him, smoking happily by the stove. In one hour we returned. Uncle Peters was still consuming cigars. On the floor lay the family cat. It did not raise its head at our footsteps. It would never look up again. The picture frames on the walls had turned green. Uncle Peters denied that his Flor de Mule Ear segars had killed the cat. He insisted she had rolled over after taking one squint at the smoking jacket. Useful gifts often have a way of making themselves useful when you least expect it. For Instance, we buried the cat in Uncle Peters’ smok ing jacket!