New Year Reveries

NEW YEAR REVERIES

If you find it so difficult to keep your New Year’s resolutions, perhaps it would be a good idea to make a few bad ones this time, for a change.  For instance, you might resolve to be cross to your wife (if you have one) every day during the year, and then give her gentle words and loving kisses instead.  You can thus be consistent with your past record, and possibly be a better man when another year rolls around.

COURAGE FOR THE NEW YEAR

Have the courage to start right and keep right.

Have the courage to turn from evil and cling to that which is good.

Have the courage to prefer comfort and propriety to fashion in all things.

Have the courage to wear your old clothes until you can pay for new ones.

Have the courage to discharge a debt while you have the money in your pocket.

Have the courage to obey your conscience at the risk of being ridiculed by men.

Have the courage to own you are poor, and thus disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

Have the courage to wear thick boots in winter, and insist upon your wife and daughter doing the same.

Have the courage to do without that which you do not need, however much your eyes may covet it.

Have the courage to speak to a friend in a “seedy” coat, even though you are in company with a rich one and richly attired.

Have the courage to speak your mind, when it is necessary you should do so, and to hold your tongue when it is prudent you should do so.

Have the courage to show your respect for honesty, in whatever guise it appears:  and your contempt for dishonesty and duplicity, by whomsoever exhibited.

Have the courage to “cut” the most agreeable acquaintance you have when you are convinced that he lacks principle.  “A friend should bear with a friend’s infirmities, but not with his vices.”

Have the courage to stand by your convictions, be both courteous and firm, making no compromise with evil, not turning into forbidden paths; choose the right, reject the wrong:  be good and do good and then you will have a Happy New Year. (The Walnut Bureau, January 1, 1909)

WALNUT BUREAU 1909 CALENDARS

Our line of 1909 calendars have arrived and consist of over three hundred latest designs of imported and domestic calendars and wall pockets, ranging in price from two to fourteen dollars per hundred.  If we can’t save you twenty-five per cent on your order of calendars we will make you a present of your 1909 order.  Figure it out for yourself.  If a calendar firm hires salesmen at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month each, and expenses of a hundred dollars for board and transportation, who pays the traveling salesmen if you don’t?  You certainly pay them if you buy their goods.  The calendar business is a side line with us, and we can sell them by sample, involving only a capital of twenty-five dollars.  Look at our line of calendars.  It costs you nothing to get wise on the calendar business.  No trouble to show samples.  (The Walnut Bureau, February 21, 1908)