On a Christmas Eve some thirty-odd years ago a very small boy, guarded on either side by sisters older than himself, knelt at the low sill of his bedroom window and looked wonderingly out into the night. Above was the sky, studded with twinkling stars. Below was a soft, silent blanket of white—the unsullied snow of a northern winter. Everything was very still.

The boy looked first at the sky. Being of the baby age when the children of the wise are put to bed with the sun, the night sky was more mystic than the snow. There were so many of those stars, and they appeared to be twinkling at him with cheerful friendliness. One attracted him particularly. It did not twinkle and was not so merry as the others, but it was larger and shone with a bright, steady glow. It seemed to be reaching down toward the boy as though it would speak to him.

He recalled the story that had been told him only the day before, the story of the first Christmas and of three wise men who had been guided to the manger wherein lay the infant Christ; and the thought came to him that this, perhaps, was the star that led them. The suggestion of the manger brought the boy’s eyes downward to the snow-topped stable opposite his window; and from the stable he turned to the white-roofed houses with their chimneys still smoking from the evening fires. He wondered if Santa Claus would have to wait till all the fires were out before he could make his rounds.

How white everything was and how still! A sense of delicious mystery crept over him. He heard the sound of distant sleigh-bells. They drew nearer and jingled more tunefully. One of his guardians caught his hand in hers and held up a warning finger. They listened.

“Quick! Maybe it’s Santa Claus!” whispered the guardians in unison; and the three scampered to their beds and disappeared beneath the blankets. Five minutes later the little boy was fast asleep.

The little boy was myself, and the incident is the first Christmas that I can recall. I recount it because it seems to illustrate the natural coalescence of the mythical idea with the historical idea of the great world holiday.

Too often, I think, the real significance of our holidays is lost in the merriment of celebrating them. Every child is entitled to a thorough explanation and a lasting impression of the incident which Christmas commemorates. In shaping the Christmas idea in the boy’s mind we should begin at the beginning. If the story of the Star of Bethlehem is told in the right way and at the right time, it may be depended upon to survive the myths and the merry-making with which the atmosphere is charged during the festal period.

And this need not militate against the development of the Santa Claus side of the celebration, for the one amplifies the other. Unselfish giving is the keynote to both, and the child-mind easily comprehends the application of the modern custom to the ancient story.

In the bringing up of my boy I have been a stickler for truth. Absolute confidence between father and son, mother and child, has been my plea and my practice, always. Yet, while not going out of my way to encourage the Santa Claus myth, I have most cheerfully tolerated it. It is the one mystery of childhood that I do not explain, and my reason for excepting it from the calendar of candour is that the end justifies the means.

I would not rob the boy of a fiction that has not one harmful possibility, and that brings so much gladness into the home, and into his heart. I would not deny him a kind of pleasure that added so much to the joy of my own childhood. But, and paramount to every other consideration, the great unassailable justification of the Santa Claus myth is the remarkable lesson it teaches.

With reasonable reservations for the unusual I may say that never, after the Santa Claus age, does a man or a woman either practise or experience that remarkable unselfishness of the parents who conceal their bounteousness behind a fiction. After childhood we continue to give and take. We give to our brothers and sisters, to our parents and to all whom we love. It is our pleasure to add to their happiness; but it is also our pleasure to feel that they know it is we who have so contributed to their enjoyment.

Not so in Santa Claus land. There, and there only, is found the absolute submergence of self, the sincerely impersonal benefaction. As a child, coming down to the dazzling Christmas tree, I said: “How good is Santa Claus!” But in after years when I began to realise that every one of those trees of joy had come from my good father, who had tramped out into the woods to cut them and had hauled them over the hills for miles, sometimes through a blinding blizzard,—then I said: “How great is a parent’s love!”

When the boy arrives at the age of serious reasoning, say six or seven, and asks me point-blank if there is really a Santa Claus, I meet the question fairly. I simply decline to answer and give him my reason for so doing. I explain to him that half the fun of the holiday lies in the mystery surrounding St. Nicholas. I tell him, good-humouredly but positively, that he must solve the Santa Claus problem himself.

By taking this position I keep square with the boy, and at the same time he is not disillusionised, for he is as willing to cling to the romance as I am to have him—and more so.

The custom, particularly prevalent in the large cities, of conducting the boy through the toy department of the stores when the big holiday stocks are on display, is to be deplored. The lavish exhibitions paraded before his eyes cannot fail to dull his appreciation of the home Christmas.

In arranging my boy’s Christmas I strive for simplicity. It was Nerissa, I think, in the “Merchant of Venice,” who said: “They are as sick who surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.” The rich—sometimes—pity the poor at Christmas.

This is well, for pity looses a purse-string occasionally, and Heaven knows there are enough tight ones! But the fact is, that the children of the moderately poor often get more real joy to a square inch of a Christmas morning than many a little brother of the rich. There can be no great pleasure in receiving when there has been no genuine longing. Only the child who has known want can fully relish realisation.

A few modest gifts, judiciously selected, are more permanently satisfying than a lavish display, indiscriminately gathered. I always try to supply my boy with one thing that he most desires, or with a fair compromise between it and what I can afford to buy. If I can meet his anticipations fully in this one gift I do so; but it must be something of a substantial and permanent nature. After which, if my purse permits, I amplify this with a few things of lesser cost and more trivial in character.

And here let me record a protest against that modern unnecessary, the perfected toy. By the perfected toy I mean the toy that is not a plaything, but an ingenious contrivance so perfected mechanically that it leaves nothing for the child to do. I protest against the toy that leaves absolutely nothing to either the fancy or the ingenuity of the boy. The imaginative faculty of a child is constantly reaching out for something upon which it may feed and develop. This propensity is stifled by the perfected toy. The railroad outfit that goes into complete operation at the turn of a lever; the doll that walks and talks and has an elaborate trousseau; the soldier equipments that fit a boy out in military style from head to toe—these and all like them are praiseworthy examples of the commercial instinct of the toymakers; but they do not meet the requirements of the child.

And if the juvenile mind were capable of self-analysis it would reject them. I learned this first from a little girl of three years. She had been deluged with presents that Christmas morning; but before an hour had passed she had looked them all over, and we found her curled up in an armchair, playing with a clothes-pin and an empty baking-powder can! Hers was the happiness found only in the land of Make-Believe.

Instead of giving my boy a soldier outfit, I would give him a pocket-knife—assuming that he is old enough to wield one. Having a new knife, he is ambitious to use it, and he fashions a sword out of a stick of pine. The sword suggests playing soldier, and he proceeds to make a peaked hat out of a newspaper; a skate-strap answers for a belt, and he makes a pair of epaulets from a scrap of tin-foil. In this way the boy is duly benefited: in creating these things his ingenuity is drawn upon, and, in supplying things that he cannot make, his imagination is exercised.

One can hardly begin too early to teach the child the pleasure of giving. A few pennies taken by him from his own little bank, and an excursion to a neighbouring store, will initiate the idea. A mere trinket for each member of the household will serve the purpose and put him on the right track. But we must go further than the family circle with the Christmas idea. We must show the boy that while charity begins at home, it does not end there.

One day shortly before Christmas, I took the boy to the closet where his discarded toys were kept, and I said:

“There are millions of children in the world, and there are not always toys enough to go around. If you will tell me which of these things you do not play with any more, I will see that they are distributed on Christmas Day among little boys and girls who otherwise would get nothing.”

He looked the things over carefully, and said finally that there was nothing that he would like to give away. I did not urge the matter; but the next day I invited him to take a ride with me on the street-car. Alighting at City Hall Park, we walked down the Bowery. Arriving at Pell Street, I found Chuck Connors sunning himself on the corner.

“Chuck,” I said, “I have a dollar in my pocket that isn’t busy, and I want you to take me to some one who needs it more than you or me.”

So off we trudged, Chuck and I, and the boy between. A few blocks farther down we turned toward the river. It was familiar ground to Chuck and me—but the boy’s eyes were opened to a new world. He saw the misery of the slums. He passed a boy of his own age, barefooted—in December—staggering under a load of scrap-wood that would have troubled a man to bear. He saw a little girl, half clad, shivering behind an ash-can, trying to hide herself from her drunken father, who leered at the waif from a hallway across the street. Pushing on into the very heart of that pitiable section, through poverty, want and wretchedness, the boy went with us through a miserable tenement, wherein the spectre of Starvation stalked through the sordid halls and snarled at my dollar bill.

On the car, homeward bound, the boy tugged at my elbow.

“Father,” he said, “besides what’s in the closet, they’s a lot of other things I don’t play with any more.”

Ever since then we have had an annual house-cleaning about a week before Christmas, and the Salvation Army wagon carries away a goodly load. Indeed, the event has come to be regarded as quite a festal occasion.

As the years go on and the boy begins to leave playland behind, I would not hurry him into the realism of the grown-up’s Yuletide. Let the charm of mystery, of certainty, of anticipation, linger as long as it will.

Perhaps last year you thought it was a bit incongruous when you found yourself slipping a safety razor into a gaily-hued sock, size ten, dangling in the chimney-corner. And perhaps you have decided that he is too big for that sort of thing now, and that you will let it go by default this Christmas. Maybe you are about to tell him so.

My friend, defer it.

Stick right on in the old way as long as you can get the boy to stick with you; for, once you have severed the ties of the Christmas of his childhood, you will have cut the tinsel thread that links your son to the only fairyland he will ever know.