The Daily News. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1912. THE CHRISTMAS SEASON.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 186, 24 December 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1912. THE CHRISTMAS SEASON.

Year by year the old festivals of our youth are dying out, and really the children of today when they reach their "te\ms" are older than their fathers and their mothers. St. Valentine has long ,since died an ignominious death; Guy Fawkes has been hoist with his own or somebody else's petard; Lob-lie-by-the-Fire no longer "reddies" the house in the early dawn for good housewives; Aladdin's wonderful lamp has been scrapped and the mushrooms are grown in mouldy cellars instead of in fairy rings. It is, in fact, an age of strict utilitarianism—we had almost said commercialism --and still through it all we have re.tained the old spirit of Christmas'. Already the air is, redolent with the wide benevolence of Yule, old antagonisms have been sunk, old loves revived and Old memories stir insistently in the Wart. Just as the New Year is the season of our moral audit, so Christmas is essentially the feast of reminiscence. "What wouldn't one give to be fifteen years old, with thirty years' experience to hack it?" wrote Marciel, in a pessimistic mood. That was a foolish saying. What a lot of pleasure and pain one would have missed had one lived in some ugly age where wisdom was the portion of youth. Let us rather be forty-five with the hearts of fifteen. It is an insistently cruel thing to us elders to see the children growing up in our likeness, leaning over the same gates to court the daughters of the mothers we courted, making the same eternal mistakes, telling the same eternal lies, telling them to the same girls reproducing the youth of their mothers. It really ought not to be allowed, especially at Christmas time, and these youngsters should be set to skipping or marbles or some other errant pastime that will keep from reminding us of the patent fact that we are growing old. That's their worst crime-these boys, and girls of oursthey set us looking backward with such eager eyes. It takes so little to set the blood stirring i„ this sappy weather, when "the good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth" is dimpling at us.in the sunshine. The very season gives m the virus of mental travel and sets us ganng backward, like Ulysses, "with a hungry heart," not to "the ringing plains of windy Troy," but to some purely personal field of reminiscence. It i s the eternal miracle that created Christmas that has given its imperishable standing among more fleeting festivals. What a memory of jolly seasons the very word spells, even in our own topsy-turvey land, where every fresh summer has added a new haunt to memory! What a host of memories of early risings to steal an hour from the day's 'linked sweetness long drawn out" before the others Avere about! What a recollection of stolen meetings and stolen partings for pure Parting's sake beneath the starry smother of December skies! How many ivisioiw of furtive watchings for that elusive friend of us all, old Santa Claus, fey with the burden of centuries of indiscriminate giving! And in later years how many ghosts «i„ many darkened doorways dwell, with desolate eyes to know them by» ; and how many happmesses of homes and hearts are to-day stretching out their hands to us it, beatific recollections. We do not want those days back, nor their loves, nor their troubles, nor their victories nor their failures. But why vex the colorless content of the Present with the "heiweh" of the Past? Still, would we have it otherwise? After all, no; for the sunshine is the brighter and the summer-time the happier for the universal benefactions of the Christmas season. Nature is for ever telling the beautiful story of the dead days born again, and shall we hesitate to tread footsteps ? Not while Life leads tis

"As eyeless men lead men Through chance by chance to deathward." So on the eve of Christmas, and on the threshold of the New Year, we join with all the friends we know and have known, and with all the friends we shall never know, in saying in the widest sincerity to all: A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR.