Christmastide.

Auckland Star, Volume 304, Issue 304, 23 December 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

Christmastide.

CHILDHOOD'S THRILLS. CRADLE SONG OF JUDEA. The whole of Christmas is built around the love of a mother for a Babe. Centuries have since rolled by; dynasties have risen and fallen; conquerors have waxed and waned; but none of these has stilled that cradle song in the quiet of the Judean starlight. Nor have the two thousand years broken the communicable spirit of sympathy between that mother at Bethlehem and the mother of to-day. As Heaven lay around that Infancy in the Bethlehem Btable, so Heaven lies around the cradle of every infant of to-day. We say wrongly sometimes that Christ asks that we shall bring Him gifts on His birthday. Nowhere in His words asks He this. He asks us to bestow what we may have, good gifts or inconsiderable tokens, on other children. For Christ is every child, and what we give to a child we give to Christ. "Inasmuch," He said, "as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me." Hence when we minister unto a child, be it our own child or someone else's child, we minister unto Christ. It follows so naturally and so conclusively, therefore, that Christmas should be for children. We elders may eDJoy Christmas in a way, but what is our enjoyment of the day now compared to the thrills that the day brought us when we were children? Let us remember back to the time when we struggled timorously beneath the coverlet, our hearts athrob with the hope of what would come tiptoe in the night after the Sandman went away! There hung the stockings, empty and arow, but before the gray glimmer of the earliest dawn there would be a miracle! Where now the stocking mouth gaped in limp dejection, there would glitter in the quickly-kindled light of a lamp, candle or firelight, a tasseled horn, or the bright eyes of a doll with arms outstretched in greeting, or some tissue-wrapped parcel with the diaphanous promise of soul-satisfying contents. There is no juvenile experience compared with the ecstatic thrill of that first hour of Christmas morning, as you burrowed all the way down to the toe of the stocking stuffed out round and large with the conclusive orange. We take pleasure now in the Christmas tree, but how? Is it not with the admiring but deliberate gaze of one who helped in its decoration, studying it with artistic eye and concluding that the picture it makes is a successful one? But what is that compared to the time when you looked at the tree as if it were a vision right out of the wonderbook of Fairyland? A tree that never stood rooted in any forest in this world; as if it came from Hans Andersen or Grimm, wafted into the room as palaces used to be whisked about on a magic carpet! That was the real Christmas to you; that is the real Christmas to-day to some other child. Let us, then, cut ourselves—we elders ■ —out of the day except as givers, and give it over to the children. But sanely. Let us remember that this great day would never have found its way to almost every hearthstone in Christendom if it were a time of taking instead of giving. No holiday centred in selfishness could survive, with undimmed light, for twenty centuries. So the children should be taught not to take, but to give to other children, and particularly to children whose nests are less downy than their own. There are so many such. And there is no harder thing in a child's life than to be forgotten on Christmas Day: Christ's day for children. To be disregarded when others are remembered. Is there any picture on earth so appealing as to see a child at a shop window with less than half of a transparent inch between his pinched nose and pointing finger and a high-piled world of dolls and drums and skates and picture books? Can the mind imagine a keener pang, a more sorrowful thing, than the unanswered prayer of a little child at Christmastide? To put your hand in your pocket and extract a coin or a banknote, that is one thing. Some folks buy grand pianos and diamond tiaras that way. But to put your sold and heart into a gift that makes it an expression of your thought and your love, that is Christmas giving: that is of Christ and like Christ. That is as near as we can come to God when He made to this world His Christmas present: His only begotten Son. If, instead or stabbing Christmas to the heart with our frantic eleventh-hour rush for presents bought from a sense of duty, we would make it a children's day, what a warmer, happier Christmas it would be for us all. For you cannot buy in cold blood for a child: there is always a warming of the heart when you touch a drum, a sled of a trumpet around Christmastime. If Christ could come to earth it is reasonably certain that He would ask nothing more of us at Christmastide than lhat we should make of His day a great birthday party for children; a children's birthday party for children, to which, particularly, the children of the poor could come, from which none would be excluded; so that beneath the roof of the lowest hovel in the land there would come the light of the Christmas spirit, and in place of the "shadow of darkness" that hangs so heavily in so many homes there would ring forth the gleeful shouts of happy children. That would be Christmas in the finest and highest sense of the word, and that kind of a Christmas we can all make of it if we will. And as we make it happy and joyful for "the least of these" we will make of the day, for ourselves, the most joyful and the happiest that we have «t__r had.