As if in slow motion, librettist Thornton Wilder summarizes a series of Christmas dinners celebrated by the Bayard family over a period of ninety years and fuses them into a single long meal. The concentration of the characters and their standardization are all things that Hindemith's setting picks up on: he counterbalanced them musically by means of development, individualization, and variation - thus designing a kind of music that expresses contingency - significant coincidence - as an attitude toward life. The view of what Wilder calls the "mill of time" is thus always a view of the future as well - whether we perceive that as misfortune or consolation or both at once.