The New-Zealander. AUCKLAND, WEDNESDAY, DEC. 25, 1861. CHRISTMAS.

New Zealander, Volume XVII, Issue 1637, 25 December 1861, Page 3

The New-Zealander.

AUCKLAND, WEDNESDAY, DEC. 25, 1861. CHRISTMAS.

He just and fear not; Let all the ends thou aim’st at, be thy Country*?, Thy God’s, and Truth’s.

The time is solemn, but it is not sad; The dim descending year may cast its shade Across our path; but still The heart appeals to that which cannot die, And now is open most to charity. For love is a perennial plant, and blooms Alike in every clime and every soil. Th’ unbroken family arc met once more Around some well-known hearth, and give the rein To household pleasures. Check not the clear Bright laugh of childhood; but call young and old To festive gambols. Spread the table well With hospitable cheer. Let genial Mirth With Innocence go hand in hand. Now drown Each rankling grievance in the rising tide Of deep domestic happiness. Forget The fierce anxieties of life. Forget The dreary world without, or give more thanks For comforts so contrasted with its gloom. But oh! remember such as share them not; Amidst thy banquet think upon the poor, And grudge them not their portion, lest they cry To heaven against thee, and so shut the gates Of mercy on thy prayer. Fear not that God Will frown upon his children’s pastime. Go, Enjoy his bounty freely, but withal Show mercy to his creatures. Nay, thou churl. Scan not their faults too sharply, unless thou Thyself are faultless. But consider well They arc Christ’s legacy. Thy gifts to them Arc by himself endorsed. To scud away A suppliant is to turn Him from your door. Come then,.and let us learn to kneel awhile Around the death-bed of another year, And think how God has led us hy a way We knew not, through the wilderness of life; Has taught our ignorance, has heard our prayers, Has healed our sorrows, and relieved our wants, Crowned us with mercies, shielded us from foes Has given his Son to suffer in our stead. Has sent his Spirit to renew our hearts, And opened immortality to man. Bella.

Christmas at the Antipodes ! We try to realise the idea, but the wildest stretch of the imagination is not equal to the effort. We try, for the sake of old recollections and association, to renew the exuberant festivities of our Fatherland, but the spirit that gave vitality to these is wanting, and we fall back with regret for the unattainable, to enjoy the holiday, as wc may, more appropriately to our altered circumstances and position. Christmas with the thermometer at 80 ° in the shade! Christmas without its family reunions—without that drawing together in one common bond of enjoyment from the highest to the lowest, which we wo almost everywhere in the rural districts of Ragland, has lost for us its chief element of festivity, and becomes but the shadow of its formei self. And then the very inclemency of the season, what a zest it gave to the enjoyment ! The mirth and revelry inside rivalling and brow-beating the very elements without, which seemed to howl in sheer desperation at their inability to damp onr merriment within!

What gathering at the hall door to greet the huge Yule log—that arbiter of the year’s happiness, for woe to the house where its embers ceased to glow before the advent of the coming year. What jokes and laughter, when, dragged by the united efforts of the household, it was cast behind the roaring kitchen-fire that leaped and crackled on the hearth, sending forth such a genial glow that the very flitches on the coiling broke out into a cold perspiration of fear at the havoc which such demonati’tttionß threatened amongst

them! What a whispering of happy surmises as the deadened sound of carriage or errt wheels, as the case might be, was heard upon the yielding snow, and doors burst open and some fresh troop of cousins or loug-looked-for visitors flocked in, and gathered round the blazing hearth and told of roads blocked up, and swollen streams, and hitter cold east winds that did their best to keep them back from those high mysteries of miseltoe, and wassail, and good cheer, with which we blithely gathered in those days gone by, perhaps for ever, to usher Christmas in. Then those who longed through lingering months past by for this much looked for gathering met again, and words and glances passed in the quick dance and merrier romp, till, amid joke and pretty scream, the miseltoe was hung high in the very centre —the miseltoe, strange plant, which acts so differently on either sex—the one, so scared and frightened that they seek to fly it as they would some pestilential Upas, and yet wavering and fluttering in their flight, seem drawn by some irresistable fascination beneath the very spot they fain would fly from. The other, till now so timid, wiser and holder grown, manfully claim the right its presence gives—one of those few rights as pleasing in the gift as the exaction.

Who that looks back upon the Christmas of his youth in. his old home in Europe, hut feels that wo are forcing nature here in clinging to the customs of the past, instead of taking nature us we find her, and adapting ourselves to the altered circumstances of our position ? Wo cannot stay the hand of fate. These family reunions, and old customs, the high spiced wassail bowl and blazing hearth, the good old Christmas games and romps — Waits—Christmas trees —and, more than all, the musical welcome of the old Church hells, can live in memory only. Not that we would summon up those memories of home to stalk like the ghosts ofßauquoand his sons before us at the present season, but rather pour them forth, perhaps in saddened mood, as a libation due to tbis high festival.

We in this country have no cause to regret, and can well spare these scenes to those who do possess them. We have gained much by the change, how much, let the inmate of many a happy home in this same city, and far and wide, for many a mile back in their forest homesteads, on many a river’s hank, mid pleasant rural nooks and green hill sides—this day bear witness! How many a one amongst us, for poverty is after all comparative, and ho who with a fortune creates wants beyond his means, is poorer still than he who curbs those wants within his narrow bounds, —how many a one, while ho has lost the heightened zest for this time honored feast, has flung at the same time aside for ever the grinding pinching cares that weighed him down throughout the livelong year. We have our own enjoyments too. The bright cigar wave of the Waitemata is broken by many a lazy oar, and the light laugh and merry jest echo along its waters; while down in the bottom of some deep gully, where the spreading fern tree and the rank foliage of a New Zealand hush still linger and shut out the sun from some fresh spot of greensward underneath, the pleasant pic-nic party where restraint and cold formality and stately grandeur have no place, is free and joyous,—while at one’s feet, suggestive of so much fun and merriment, and wit, and joviality, dances over its pebbly bed the clear cool water of the little stream. Commend us to these rural Saturnalia for quiet fun and real heartfelt enjoyment. The crowded room has no such zest for us as these. Commend us to the lonely saunter midst the trees, some little hand held timidly in our own, and leave the dance to those who love the whirl and glare of heated rooms more than the fresh coo! haunts of nature !

Fur off too in our quiet rural districts, where the axe and plough have turned the wilderness into green meadows and waving cornfields, the fanner, sitting literally in the shadow of Ids own vine and fig tret*, looks over lands of ripening grain, and thanks God from his heart that these are till his own—nor loves them less because they are the works of his own hands, nor that his thoughts revert to his first lonely, cheerless, Christmas on that spot. And if perchance tho merry laugh of children echoes round him, no shadow falls upon his brow, as once it might, to dim his present joy with the dark thought of a rough world before them with all its cares and ill-requited struggles. Who would not change the Christmas of his youth for such an one as this ! Who would not give a few days’ holidays whose very zest, with millions, only springs from its comparison with the long dreary months behind it, for one like this of sobered joy, and thankfulness for all the daily blessings which, under Heaven, we owe to this fair land of our adoption ! To you, our readers, and to all our fellow-colonists, whoso love for this their new-found home is deep and trustful, we heartily wish “A merry, merry Christmas” now, and many more to come.