Christmas

CHRISTMAS
     Though Christmas comes each year, it means too much ever to be stale. In religion, it celebrates the best part of the Christian faith, a new joy that came into the world. As a holiday, it is the season of expansion, generosity, leading other's lies. Cold reason would say that the best time for making gifts was when necessity called, opportunity invited, or impulse urged, but Christmas throws reason to the winds and opens the arms of faith and profusion once each year. The shops are loaded with grotesque and useless toys-unless, save to give little human beings joy. Many a poor soul pinches for the sake of donating some guerdon of its love, and is, perhaps, the better for the sacrifice. "Wear this for me,"- no words mean more, and a of all gifts, as the American genius said, the best is a portion of thyself.  "Therefore, the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own painting." Alas for us, who can give only what we buy; and yet even that carries our emotion, for it is chosen lovingly. Certainly the principle of the widow's mite holds true in Christmas giving as in charity, for all depends upon what it means to the giver. Who has not been moved by receiving the tribute of a child-a bit of paper, tooth or carl- comic or pathetic- in a way that he could be touched by no carelessly choosing Croesus? So no wagon-load of city roses can carry the perfume of the heart as it is borne by the blossoms which the giver's hand has culled or his slender purse has shrunk to buy. Christmas, the season of giving and rejoicing, helps us all to part of the spirit after which the day is named; the child with his joy, the rest of us with charity and the love of man. How few are a hundred Christmases in one life!
--Collier's Weekly.