If you ever examine the early Chinese vases in the Fogg Museum or elsewhere, you will note that many of them have little cracks in the glaze which run every whichway. You might conclude that these were caused by antique methods of firing the pottery, or are just the result of old age. Actually these cracks, which are known as crackle in the glaze, were made on purpose. For it seems that these vases were often given as New Year's presents, and since New Year's is celebrated by the Chinese in the spring, the crackle was made to represent the breaking-up of the ice on the rivers and lakes, the change from the hard and fastness of winter to the movement of spring.

We miss something important in our symbolic thinking by not celebrating Christmas and New Year's at a time when nature herself takes a new lease on life. It is more difficult for us to realize the possibility of the breaking up of the old and the forming of the new when the ice is thickening on the ponds and the snow is driving deeper on the hills. It is hard enough as it is to become renewed in the spirit of our minds.

We try instead to capture newness by thinking of a child, a symbolic child that appears on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal. Dressed in the scantiest of clothing, his chubby face covered with a broad grin, the spirit of the New Year ushers us into a new calendar. And in the hurry and excitement of the time it may have slipped our minds that only a week before we recalled a real child, a child that once was born in fact and ever since has been reborn in the souls of men.

I wonder if we ever associate these two children and ponder the meaning of each, for in a way they have a joint significance. The child of New Year's means new opportunities, new openings for a world of men sick and tired of the old. Those who would live by this child alone, however, soon run into depressing frustration for they have forgotten that new things do not come easily to old men—men that are old in spirit of whatever age. They find that new opportunities can only be met and made use of by people who have a spring of newness within them; they realize that here is where newness counts most, down at the depths of the soul. And perhaps they discover—God grant that they do for it is the greatest discovery that a man can make—perhaps they discover that this is the meaning of the child of a week before.

Those old words about dying to sin and rising to newness of life, of being born again like Nicodemus, or at least the reality within those words, may of a sudden catch hold of a man and shake him to the core—shake out the old egocentric habits, break up the shoddy ways of thinking, that he may be regenerate and born anew of the Christ within him.

We are reminded annually on Christmas Day that a new creature is possible, a new creature with fresh reactions and an unburdened soul. We are reminded of this every time we come to the Holy Communion and hear Christ's words, "Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you."

But response may be withheld and the opportunity passes us by. W.H. Auden states the only too often repeated case in his Christmas Oratorio:

That is one possibility, merely to regard the child of Christmas as a symbol, like the child of New Year's—two fabulous children who have no meaning once the holiday season is past. Or we can see in one Child the very reality of newness, a newness that we can have and use for this New Year's and every New Year's to come—the spirit of God, eternally new.