From the December 19, 1924 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

An old-fashioned country hotel in an old-fashioned country town in which to eat a Christmas dinner is the object of a search instituted by Jay E. House who does a daily column for the New York Evening Post. “We could stand a modern hotel,” he writes, “if nothing else offered, but we insist on the country town — one in which everybody knows everybody else. For it is only in such towns that the old-fashioned Christmas spirit still prevails.”

There is a hotel, exactly like the one that Mr. House yearns for, and we know where it is, but how he can get to it is a problem that we do not know how to solve. It exists in his dreams; not, we fear, anywhere else. An old-fashioned hotel? Alas, they aren’t old-fashioned nowadays. The bar is gone with prohibition, and there is a radio in the parlor. Once there was a capacious fire-place, holding a backlog that was all the hired man could lug in; but the fireplace has been sealed, and there is a steam heater in the cellar. It’s dollars to doughnuts that the Christmas dinner menu, if one is printed, is a close imitation, so far as nomenclature can make it so, of the one at the Waldorf-Astoria.

We think that we know exactly what Mr. House wants in his expressed desire for an old-fashioned Christmas dinner in an old-fashioned hotel in an old-fashioned country town. He wants the lost illusions of youth. He wants the brave days when he was twenty-one. He wants the snows of yester-year. He wants things that are not to be had; it may well be that they never were on land or sea.

Ten years ago we would have ventured to suggest that Mr. House could find an approximation of his heart’s desire at Edgartown. Here was hood cooking by Mrs. Kelly; and in the living room — there was neither office nor parlor at the Kelly house — was cheerful discourse by Bill Kelly himself, with reminiscences of Massachusetts celebrities that had stopped with him when business brought them to the shire town of the county of Dukes county. It was Bill Kelly who so dwelt upon the wonders of the nearby island of Chappaquiddick that the late Chief Justice Aiken was moved to adjourn court at noon so that he could visit the place and help his host drive some cows to a new pasture. But Kelly is gone; and in any case Edgartown is farther from New York than the four hours’ train ride that Mr. House stipulates.

There was a Whitesell’s at Nazareth, the Pennsylvania Moravian village, where could be had chicken and waffles of which one retains ambrosial memories, but perhaps that old place has been modernized and standardized, and we should not dare to suggest it as the inn of Mr. House’s dreams. ­­— From Editorial in New Bedford Standard, Dec. 6.

But the Kelley House is there, good as of old, and Mrs. Kelley still superintends. The old inn has indeed added to its fame in the passing of the years. The writer once heard the late Morton Dexter, Boston literary celebrity, and a man who had travelled wide, say that the Kelley House reminded him of the best type of English inn as found in the prosperous towns, and that nowhere in all England, and he had covered the country very thoroughly had he found an inn which could excel the Kelley House at Edgartown for its food and the homey comforts extended to its guests. Mr. Dexter, for a long series of summers, was a guest at intervals of the famous hostelry.

The Hospital is hoping that patients who are there over Christmas Day will be happy, as everything is being done for their pleasure. There will be a Christmas Tree and a Christmas party from seven to eight o’clock on Christmas eve. Miss Eva Corey, one of the nurses, will take the part of Santa Claus.

The Girl Scouts have also made attractive red nut baskets for the trays. Mrs. Bagshaw, president of the Oak Bluffs Auxiliary, has promised to send a complete basket including a Christmas turkey. Leland Renear, of Vineyard Haven, will bring the Christmas trees and Mrs. Riordan of Vineyard Haven has already supplied the holly. Already there seems to be a bit of Christmas feeling in the hospital and we are trying to have this idea of Christmas grow stronger and stronger each day until. at last, on the 25th of December, they will be able to make the patients who must be away from home very happy.

A cordial invitation is also extended to one member of each patient’s family to have dinner at the hospital.

The Gazette thanks the New England News Company for a copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, 1925. When we take time to consider that no one is alive on earth today who perused the first issue of this almanac when it appeared 132 years ago, we realize the worth and venerableness of this favorite New England weather indicator and repository of a thousand other interesting facts and figures. No New England home is complete without the Old Farmer’s handily hung in the kitchen.

Compiled by Hilary Wallcox

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