Folder 342A

[printed in ink with margin lines on left side and at top of page]

[The following text is printed above the margin line at top of page:] ACKNOWLEDGING, ex animo, 1100 ODD CHRISTMAS CARDS, GRATEFULLY RECEIVED:

HAIL AND FAREWELL

To eleven hundred Christmas Cards we quakingly respond, In bad blank forms of blanker verse to Friendship’s Golden Bond, And tell our Friends the world around that last year was our worst In fifty fevered Annums through all which we limped or burst.

For never was there leaner year of all that we craved most, Nor was Dame Fortune ever such a mean and ugly Host To every cheerful one of us in every cheerless town, To every gay or gloomy guy - a climbing up or down.

Our slanders of the Year just gone would not be fit to print, And at our picture of its crimes you’d hardly dare to squint. But ne’ertheless we’d like to swat Old Thirty on the beak For knocking our subsistence down to forty cents a week!

We’d also like to wallop drear “October ’29,” And take a crack at later dates of Crashes and Decline, And if it were not useless we would like to bark the Nose Of Labor and its knaveries, its arrogance and pose— (The rackets of its Plumbers and the swindles of its Clod, Who prey each day on every one, but never pray to God!)

All this is why we haven’t write our usual New Year’s squeak, To give Old Friends a merry laugh on every plain and peak, From London to Manhattan and from Norway to Japan— In every clime from underwear to none at all on tan.

Exeunt

May the Devil take Old Thirty to the Grave Yard of Dead Time, And chalk it in his Year Books as a nightmarean crime. Then smile upon Young Thirty-One, but warn it from the hearse, That it better be a better Year—‘cause it couldn’t be a worse!

And when Old Thirty’s buried in the heart of Mother Earth, May Plenty come to take the place of last year’s painful Dearth, And make us all forget out woes in joys of Thirty-One, And wish we’d never scrivened this wild Howlet-all-in-Fun!

[end of poem] [in a smaller font at the bottom of the page are the following lines:]

Done impudently, in the Barn back of Trail House on the Litchfield Hills Nature Trail, in Connecticut, at Dawn on New Year’s Day, 1931, to satisfy the yearly clamor of many Friends throughout the World.

Censored, expurgated, denounced, edited, printed, published, circulated, paid for and regretted by Henry Wellington Wack, for Poot von Dinkelspitz, the versatiliass cook, chauffeur, carpenter, caretaker, gardener, guide and gink-of-all-work at Trail House.

All complaints should be sent to STUDIO 1519, 113 WEST 57TH STREET NEW YORK