CHRISTMAS RECESS.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON: The annual Christmas recess is drawing near, and it may not be out of place to express again the prevailing sentiments of the students as to its duration and arrangement. The Puritan founders of our college, as is well known, were a narrow-minded set of men in some particulars, though great and good in others. One of their exhibitions of narrowness consisted in their condemnation of the celebration of Christmas as an institution of Romanism, a lineal descendant of the east of the Saturnalia of the Pagan Yule Tide, etc. Now a relic of this ancient Puritan narrowness has come down to us in our college regulations making the Christmas recess as short as possible, and fixing it without regard to the day of the week on which Christmas happened to come. Our recess is from four to twelve days shorter than with the majority of the institutions for higher education in this country. Those of us who live west of Chicago cannot possibly get home by Christmas day unless we start before college closes, nor can we get back to Cambridge in time for the opening of college exercises, unless we start several days before New Year's. It seems to me that the time has come for our Faculty to recognize in the arrangement of vacations that the United States really extends as far west as the Pacific Ocean and that men who live outside the sacred boundaries of New England have as good a right to go home for Christmas as those who live in the city of Boston. We do not ask to have the four days, which would extend our vacation to the customary two weeks, added by simply dropping them out of the term, for no one would object to a corresponding shortening of the long summer vacation. Harvard College exercises begin fully a week later in the fall than those of most other colleges, and I think most students agree that we would spend this week much more profitably in college than in looking around our native streets after most of our friends had begun their studies.

Matters, however, would be at least bearable if we were allowed to cut the few recitations just before and just after the Christmas recess on our own responsibility, without other consequence than those of loosing the advantages to be gained by attending them. But when the college authorities see fit to fix important examinations for the day before the recess, some protest ought to be made. If we cut those examinations we endanger our standing for the year, and if we do not cut them, some of us cannot get home till after Christmas. The Christmas week and the New Year's week, both entire, ought to form the recess, because they are universally recognized as holiday weeks. But if the faculty thinks best continue college exercises into one or both of these weeks, the exercises should be made as nearly voluntary as possible.

N. H. 4.