Christmas Now

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 339, 21 December 1945, Page 5

Christmas Now

T has called for a good deal of courage for six years to offer one another the usual Christmas greetings, but never for so much as this year. It was always in our minds during the bleakest days oi the war that a day would come on which the fighting would cease; and it did come. To-day we have peace-a peace so strange that no one knows what to think about it. It is doubtful if civilisation since the Stone Age has ever been so completely bewildered. Hiroshima’s bomb may have blown war for ever from the earth, and if it has, history will call Christmas 1945 the most memorable since the first. If war comes back, and the atomic bomb with it, there may be no history to write in another generation, and no one to write it. Nor are these mere rhetorical flourishes. They are everywhere accepted as possibilities, and by an increasing number as probabilities. We. are all looking into an abyss which the dullest know may suddenly engulf us; will engulf us if we go blindly on. It is there that our first peace Christmas finds us, and _ the thoughts and feelings that we would normally circulate at such a season are conditioned by the darkness ahead of us. It is still possible to wish one another well; to do it sincerely and with some heartiness; but it is not possible to do it with the old abandon. Goodwill is now nuclear nonsense unless we already have new hearts and minds; and that is very near to saying that there are now only two ways of celebrating Christmas without humbug-the Christian way and the way of carpe diem. If we have seen the folly of war, the sin and shame of it as well as the danger, we may rejoice because we have repented. If we have learnt nothing and regretted nothing, we may still eat, drink, and make merry, but it will be in fear of that to-morrow on which we know we shall die.