CHRISTMAS : ITS ORIGIN, ITS SPIRIT.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 11, 28 January 1905, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHRISTMAS : ITS ORIGIN, ITS SPIRIT.

Christmas is such a thoroughly established institution, so integral a part of our yearly programme that I really don’t think the possibility of dispensing with it ever occurred to me until A.H.J.’s little poem, “A False Calendar,” came to hand, and I “fell to thinking how ’twould be If such a thing were true,” and Christmas were wiped off the calendar. Surely winter would seem a long, cold, cruel season without the anniversary that opens our hearts, our homes, and our.purses, and possesses us with the spirit of loving and giving, and kindly thought of others. Our Christmas season is a curious commingling of Christian and pagan ceremonials. When Christianity was making slow headway against polytheism, the early fathers of the church found it expedient to engraft upon the new faith some of the customs and practices of the old. Thus long before the Christian era “the babe in the manger” was a symbol of the birth of the new year, and was part of the Saturnalia, or festival of Saturn, the maddest and most riotous of pagan feasts. The decorations of our houses with evergreens and mistletoe comes from the rites of the ancient Druids, who yearly cut the milkyberried parasite from the trees with silver Knives and much ceremonial. The Druids were not pagans, ’as the Homans were; they believed in God, in a future life, in rewards and punishments for good and evil doing, but their faith was crude and cruel.

The giving of gifts, the feastings, and the benefactions to the poor which characterise the great Christian holiday were features of the midwinter festival of the pagans, and were grafted upon the new religion to make the transition from the one to the other more easy. Latar Christmas revels, the wassail, the “waits,” traces of which stißjjjsslrvive in Engl: .d, can be followed back to the Yule festival of the ancients, Yule being the name of the winter month in which the days began to lengthen. Yule was derived from Huie, a wheel, the ancient symbol of the sun. Great logs were drawn to the cavernous fireplaces of those days with great ceremony and merriment, and were lighted as symbolical of the return of the sun in lengthening days. The early Christians did not specially celebrate the nativity, but regarded as more sacred the anniversary of Christ’s baptism, as the date on which His ministry began. The institution of the festival of Christmas is attributed to the Emperor Commodus, and it was. not until about A.D. 380 that eastern churches generally adopted it. “Christ’s Mass”—from which Christmas is derived, was in earlier times selebrated at the New Year (January 6) by eastern Christians. Julius 1., Bishop of Rome, fixed the date we now celebrate as Christmas. Christmas is not, therefore, the exact anniversary of the nativity, that date being unknown. It is a day set apart to celebrate the event, much as we set apart Thanksgiving as a day of gratitude and giving thanks for the bountiful gifts of the earth. All Christian nations observe Christmas. It is a well-nigh universal holiday. Some of us keep it in spirit; there are few who do not keep it in the letter. The mysteries begin weeks prior to its coming. We plan the Christmas surprises, practice selfdenial to swell our Christmas fund, or give our time to the making of gifts, that we may fitly celebrate its annual return. There is something about the season that inclines the heart to generosity. We want to make others happy. We begin prudently—set a limit to our expenditures and declare, “thus far, and not a shilling over.’ But ‘the loving and giving spirit” grows apace. We are tempted; there are so many lovely things in the shops, so many expedients to wile away the cash from our pockets. Just as long as we keep our motives pure and high, and don’t let them descend to the level of a “bargain counter” Christmas, our joy in Christmas is real. But when we make gifts because others have given to us; when we measure values; when we let ourselves feel a little envious because others have received more richly or more abundantly than we, we very soon find out that we have lowered the high meaning of the day and drifted far from its spirit. A merry Christmas by no means requires expensive gifts. A tree prettily dressed with strings of popcorn and cranberries and hung with apples and oranges delights child eyes as much as if its adornments -were more costly. Little things please if chosen with thought of the desires of the recipient. Have a good dinner, and invite some who would otherwise eat a scanty or a lonely one to dine with you. Don’t have a selfish Christmas, but let your Christmas giving and your Christmas cheer radiate from your home to bless the poor, the lonely, the unfortunate. Make up your mind to do something toward making some “outsider” have a merry Christmas, and the act will prove a benison upon your own. Last year a kind-hearted woman invited to her Christmas table a man who called to see her husband on Christmas morning. He was poor, shabby, lonely; lie had I ten down in the depths of despair; he had “eaten husks with swine,” and was trying to win his way back to respectability. He ate as only a half-famished man can eat at a home table, and when he went away, warmed and fed, and, better yet, cheered by the kinly welcome and encouraged hv being greeted as a friend and an equal, tears ran down his cheeks as he thank d his entertainers.

Did not that woman’s act breathe moie of the true spirit of Christmas than 1 tie entertaining of well to do friends, or bestowing of rich gifts upon those who already had more than fhey need?