SYMBOLISM OF CHRISTMAS

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20989, 16 December 1939, Page 16 (Supplement)

SYMBOLISM OF CHRISTMAS

A Light In Our Darkness

There are two ways to regard Christmas. You may. if it please* you, insist on the religious observance of complete family ceremony, bulging stockings, hanging on the children’s bed-posts, early morning service, holly wreathed round the pictures, a tree decked with stars, the joyous secrets of family gifts, the bachelor uncle perspiring in a red dressing gown and a cotton wool beard and the incredible gastronomic orgy of turkey and plum pudding and mince pies. Or you may treat the whole affair with a great affectation of ennui; you may yawn, at family obligations, lay in a great stock of gin and Italian (not so much in a spirit of jollity but as a fortification against the drear festivity of the day) you may switch on the wireless and scoff at the carols, and deplore the lack of an evening paper. Yes, there are two ways to regard Christmas, but there is no way to disregard it. Somehow it has survived. It survives the blatant, zestful commercialism of the chain stores, it survives the abhorrent sentimentality of robin-infested Christmas cards, it survives the hell-fire horror of the dietician, it survives the disruption of family life, the segregation of lone men and women in minute service flats, the anti-sentimental realism of just grown-up youth. More than that—it survives the long screaming of shells that tear men’s flesh, the thick fumes of gas that rot men’s lungs, the tenacious agony in cities laid waste by war, the long weariness of a world ravaged by fear. Belief is Greater Than Man The symbolism of Christmas endures and is made manifest once again in the cycle of every year. On Christmas morning hope must return to the hopeless, belief to the unbelieving—belief in the only thing that is greater than man, and that the spirit within man; hope in the only thing that nourishes the spirit, and that the dream that strains upward beyond the devastation man has wrought. On the first Christmas Day the dream became man and was slain by man. Only on each Christmas afterwards must it be bom again as a sign that love will not be defeated forever. The dream of Christmas survives defeat, failure, hate, distrust, fear; it is the dream that man killed in the flesh that might endure in the spirit. Does it matter that Christmas means for us forever those things that are remote and past imagining ? Does it matter that we must wonder always who has accomplished even the shadow of his dream ?. Does it matter that immaculate perfection is as far from us yet as the still serenity of the stars ? What matters it that a flame burns in the heart of darkness, that silence speaks in the midst of noise, that a frail ghost still wanders living oyer the battlefields of the dead. Christmas means that man doomed to mortality is destined to eternal life, that man destroyed by hate shall still endure through 1 ? v f; , F ? r at the Christmastide once again the voice of the godhead shall be heard. My voice he shall not lack, nor my warm song Shredding complacent night. He too shall shatter Men’s drowsy souls,” so spoke the nightingale From the cold mangerside . . . The cock, bright-crested, spoke from a high beam, His clarion voice, like mine, shall fill the World And call the dawn up from the shallow hills Scattering the yellow light.”