THIS is the time when we decorate our habitations with holly and mistletoe, and our hearts with unwonted good feeling, commemorating the dawning of a great light. There are certain stations in the journey of the year, where we may see the legend writ large on the signboards: "Change here for a better way of life; change here for happiness." We read, and come out on the platform; make festivity a little in the waiting (and refreshment) rooms, and then bundle back into the old train, having never changed at all. The Christmas-New Year time, and the Easter-time of the flowers, are two such important junctions; and it is worth while to note that these feasts were kept long before the advent of Christianity. For Christmas is in the very nature of things, and not merely historically, the birthday of the Christ. It is the end of the winter solstice, when the sun is, as it were, born anew after his months of decline, and begins to flow towards the high tide mark of his power.

That there is a certain reality in the significance of the season, is proven by the bright good will that greets us when we rise on a Christmas morning, and that it is so hard to escape. Marley's ghost and the three spirits will be apt to haunt the veriest Scrooge among us, forcing issues, compelling us to see that benevolence and kindliness are part of the essential business of life. Though we starve our souls on a thin diet of self-interest during the rest of the year, now our fare shall be less meager, and the whole world demands of us that we share in the common joy. There lies the heart and crux of it all—share. It is a great thing that there should be the habit of present-giving; it is so easy, when one is considering the giving of a gift, to escape from self, and take thought in some degree for the one to whom the gift is destined. Just a little such thought is cleansing; for even the least trickle of it, Augean selfhood is the sweeter and more habitable. And here it is flowing at Christmas time, a full current of which all the world may partake. The force of age-long custom has dedicated the day, and the habit has been formed of making an effort at brotherly feeling. We think of the children, of absentees, of many we give no thought to at other times. No doubt but for this, many a soul still flickers on, that would else have dwindled long since into pin-point insignificance, or waned altogether out of minds anchored at all other times to dreary and sordid self-interest. No doubt our civilization would be nearer to the rocks even than it is, or quite battered and broken on them, were it not that we do put some strain on the rudders, and turn, if falteringly and without clear design, to the free open waters on this one day of the year.

It is the proof of brotherhood, and that we are all filled with a common life, this generality of Christmas good will. We share in thought and feeling, as much as we do in the very air we breathe; mental infection is as real, and perilous, as the physical infection of disease. One man's thinking, though unuttered, shall pass through a thousand minds, sowing wheat or tares, good or evil, light or darkness, health or disease, in every one of them. What a new light this sheds on the question of reform! New laws are only efficient as old modes of thought are sweetened and uplifted. Will you move heaven and earth over the mote that is in your brother's eye, forgetting the beam that is in your own? Then do you stand accused, not merely of hypocrisy, but of being a worthless, profitless laborer, a twister of sand-ropes, a plower of the barren shore.

But what might not Christmas be for us, were we to treat it really reasonably! Happiness lies not in the region of sanctimonious ecstatics; but then, it is also incompatible with an overloaded stomach. We begin well enough with the wishes for a "Merry Christmas"; excellently well with the geniality and present-giving. What a promise there is for all sorts and conditions of men, or nearly all, on a Christmas morning: what a general sun of Austerlitz is it that rises! But how of its setting? What heavy physical clouds there are apt to be; what a sinking low, a simple vanishing, of ideals—what mere brute, material indigestion! Heigho! here's a come-down—from Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, to these well-known, brain-deadening results!

It all comes of our erratic, freakish extremism. We pride ourselves on the practical trend of our lives: Gad, there's no nonsense here; it is a businesslike and commonsense generation, with the whole trade of the world on its hands; and what would you have, sir? Why, some evidence of that same so-much-bragged-of commonsense, if there be any. Our notion of carrying on the work of the world is, on the whole and for the most part, a fever; a wearing out of manhood, a furious, unseemly jostling round the trough wherein providence, like a swineherd, pours the wash of money, position, fame, power, etc.; and while we are so fighting and swilling, the work of the world is left undone; it may take care of itself, it may go hang, we will have none of it. Does anyone doubt that? Let him look around and see the abuses that remain and fester, heaven knows, till the world is rank with the corruption of them. Let him think of the reformatories that don't reform; of the horror that walketh by night in the cities. When he has taken note of all the work left undone within the limits of his own nation, let him consider, but with more charity—for the conditions will be less easy for him to understand—the work that other nations are leaving undone; the work that humanity as a whole whistles past unheeding. And meanwhile we sweat and drudge and strain, strain and drudge and sweat after the things we desire, money and so forth; we give health for it, culture for it, leisure for it, honor for it, virtue for it, manhood for it; and call that business; call that doing the work of the world. Oh how this aching earth must be desiring a humanity that can put in some claim to be human!

We cannot go on so always; we must of course have safety-valves somewhere; and so we arrange these holidays and festivals, when we shall react and revolt against the things of common day, and be wildly different, for those few annual hours at least. Now we will have pleasure, rest, recreation. So—

Oh, we know the sweet fair picture! We know how it is done, only too often, this recreation business. Come now, who is it that is recreated? Which element, which party, which guild or stratum of society in that curious pathocratical republic, that kingless, impolitic, mob-swayed kingdom called the human personality, rises like a giant refreshed from the somnolent, torpid nebulosity wherewith the liver, poor drudge on strike, has its revenge on its tyrant? How much of Christmas good will, Christmas merriment and cheer, will be carried forward? What new light will shine on our workaday activities?

You pass through a treasure-house, from which you may take what you will, and the more you take, the better. But you "take no thought for the morrow"—with a vengeance! you pay no heed to the rich and beautiful things; you allow yourself to be beguiled, from entrance to exit of it, by that most wily esurient companion Appetite, that should be slave and porter but has tricked himself into the position of master and guide. We do go in there, indeed; we do see the treasures; it is proven for us that they exist, and undoubtedly we are the better for that. But we might go forth enriched for the whole year; and—we don't. Christmas, that might be perennial, hardly lasts for a whole day.

Why should not such a birthday be kept in a fitting manner? Is there nothing within ourselves that corresponds to the Hero of the day—no sunbright redeeming principle? Indeed there is; and it is the service of that that pays (to put it vulgarly); for that is the soul, whose mere garments are brain and body and appetites; indeed, whose mere hopples and handcuffs they are. No joy is acceptable, or without its sickening foul aftertaste, unless countersigned by It; that feast is poisonous of which It does not partake. To carry through the day the jolly atmosphere of good will and good service, of stepping outside selfhood; to keep one's insolent servant, appetite, cowed and right down in its place, finding pleasure in the things that belong to ourselves, not to it—that would be to celebrate Christmas rationally. When we do so, we do not find that the Christmas spirit wanes with the waning of the holidays.

I wish the whole world could have just a glimpse of the Lomaland Christmas, which is such a rational one, permeated with sunlight "both within and without." Then it would be more generally understood, how that the day may be, and ought to be, the feast-day of Human Brotherhood, the annual reconsecration of the celebrants to all things bright and beautiful, and cheerful and excellent, and happy and thoroughly practical and of good report. By heaven, the influence of these Theosophical Christmases will make its mark on the world yet!