SPIRIT OF XMAS

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 22 December 1926, Page 4

SPIRIT OF XMAS

WHY THE FESTIVAL SAESON WILL NEVER DIE OUT. Is Christmas out of fashion ! Perhaps it may be for the moment. The War might well have killed Christmas, if the feast did not be long to the things which do not die Economic difficulties, and the new tariffs have dealt stout blows at the most beautiful of all the festivals. Yet Christmas persists. It is in the guardianship, not of the children whose feast it is, but of the parents, the unselfish, the harassed, the striving parents. Since most of the children will in turn be parents themselves, they may be trusted to hand on the feast.

One speaks of the more human aspects of course, the whole crop of happy and innocent observances which have grown up about Christmas. It must have been a long time since those observances began to gather. They had their origin probably in the Kings from the East who brought gifts to the Child, and the shepherds who brought their oaten pipes, and their ball and bunch of cherries (in mid-winter) according to- the old Miracle Day, all to amuse a little Child. In Continental countries the Christmas crib is the prettiest of all toys. One wishes it might appear with all its innocencies in the London shops at Christmas-time. We owe the observance of Christmas, as it is kept by all the world, Christian or non-Christian, to the undying child in the heart of man and woman I daresay it is a fairly common experience that when the Christmas indication begins to ap pear on the horizon like Northern Lights, one says firmly: “This Christmas I will give no present ; the times are too hard.’’

But as time goes on that high re solve weakens. Thera is a tug at cur heart-strings, at our purse strings, if there ever are any strings to our purses nowadays; we try to turn a deaf ear. Then qomes the day when the tug is too insistent to be disobeyed. We shut our eyes to the state of our bank hooks, the income tax, and other unpleasant mat ters, and. taking the bit between our teeth, rush out and buy. What matter if our richest friends have re sisted the impulse valorously. that only the poorest of our friends have been culpably weak with one's self! We have had the glorious pleasure of giving, the writing of letters, the making up of parcels, the standing in the queue at the post office—all wearisome things if the child were not awake and running and singing in one’s heart.

The self-sacrifice of parents? Well, is it self-sacrifice? Father, being a simple creature and loving praise, perhaps thinks it is. Mother knows otherwise. They are both satisfying the eternal child that is not cast out except by cruelty and hardness.

If you' think o fit the record of the family is a wonderful and beautiful thing. The love of two very ordinary people, it may be, meets above the children. It is a holy war for the children. The cold must be shut out and the rain and the dark ness. No matter who gpes without, the children must be fed and clothed and lie warmly. Whatever one gives up, there is enough and more of compensation in the little firm bundle within one's arms that is the child.

I hear the scoffers mocking at this picture, telling me that the children lit- in cold and darkness, that the parents are brutal and selfish and cold. Alas, that is true, but only of the abnormal and the very unhappy. I have seen a tramping beggarwoman wrap her child in her cloaK with such a look of love and devo tion as made her for the moment above earth

Happy they who have still a child or children for whom to make Christmas. Father may be gloomy, Mother harassed, but still with her wings ever the children, at other times of the year. But as Christmas draws near Father will forget the bills that will come in after Christmas, and will sally forth and buy a trinket for Mother as in the days when he went courting. Mother's hands and his will meet over the gifts for the children, the stocking waiting to be filled, and all the other sweet observances. The shops, the Christmas catalogues, tell us that Christmas is still in its heydey, despite the cynics and the inqome tax and the ghastly spectre of unemployment and the shades of the Great War.

Parents-—yes, and Grannies—ar~ protecting Christmas. If the cynic doubts the joy of it, and says he has no bird singing in his heart, no immortal child, let him, or her—the cynic is very often feminine

nowadays, and perhaps that is hard ly to be wondered at—beg, borrow, or steal a child.

I, who speak, have received a gift of a child-—a little grandchild, after years without a child. It has been good to satisfy the child in one’s heart, the craving for toys, to have a real, a beloved child, to lead to the Christmas joys. To have a child just three years old running tothe fire place after some' naughti, ness and calling out : “Santa Claus, I will be good”; to see him hang up his minute socks either side the fireplace on Christmas Eve; to watch his face when he discovers the socks filled to overflowing on Christmas morning with heaped parcels about his plate and a little Christ-inas-tree standing in the corner—al’ that makes one a child again. I remember hearing a demure, w-ise little nurse, in the happy old days, make the following delicious observation on Christmas:

“In all the shops now”—these wer local shops—“there are children waiting to be served, only they are sc small that the assistants sometimes cannot see them at all; and they are saying: ‘Please, I want something very beautiful for a lady, only it mustn’t cpst more than six pence.’ ” I remember, too, a little girl, with wildly flowing hair, who promised her Mother “something realty beautiful” for a February birthday; she had only sixpence to spend, so she brought home a bunch of daffodils. And the little boy who, being wise beyond his seven years was allowed to do his Christmas shopping alone and unattended at a row of shops which necessitated no crossing of the streets, and cam.home after three hours of an alarm ing absence with something for everybody, and a ring with an amethyst stone in it for his mother because she had always loved amethvsts.

“It cost one-and-sixpence, darling and they said they hadn’t realty anything for the money, but they were most awfully kind for, at last, they got me this. You see, I 'couldn’t go away, and the lady was most awfully sorry, when she found what a long time I’d been waiting.’' Surety it is the parents who, all down the ages, have been saving Christmas for the children, because the love of children brings back the child in one’s own heart? Father may say when Christmas is over : “Well, thank goodness Christmas comes but once a year.” and pretend that he would much rather have kept Christmas quietly with a cigar and a book or gone to the winter sports, and mother may be a little weary, and somewhat daunted by the memory of the money she has spent, but all the same they know that they have been deliciously happy. Father and his friends—grave, responsible citizens though they are —have donned coloured caps out of crackers and forgotten that they were not children. They have been burning the sacred fire, keeping the tradition of Christmas that has been handed down to them through the ages. They are the trustees of th? darling young, and if they are to be worthy they must keep the bird singing always in their own hearts