If we ourselves loved a truthful, quiet way of living better than any other way, how would we feel to see our friends preparing to celebrate our birthday with strain, anxiety, and confusion? If we valued a loving consideration for others more than anything else in the world, how would it affect us to see our friends preparing for the festival with a forced sense of the conventional necessity for giving?
Who gives himself with his gift feeds three,—
Himself, his hungry neighbor, and Me."
That spirit should be in every Christmas gift throughout Christendom. The most thoughtless man or woman would recognize the truth if they could look at it quietly with due regard for the real meaning of the day. But after having heard and assented to the truth, the thoughtless people would, from force of habit, go on with the same rush and strain.
It is comparatively easy to recognize the truth, but it is quite another thing to habitually recognize your own disobedience to it, and compel yourself to shun that disobedience, and so habitually to obey,—and to obey it is our only means of treating the truth with real respect. When you ask a man, about holiday time, how his wife is, not uncommonly he will say:—
"Oh, she is all tired out getting ready for Christmas."
And how often we hear the boast:—
"I had one hundred Christmas presents to buy, and I am completely worn out with the work of it."
And these very women who are tired and strained with the Christmas work, "put on an expression" and talk with emotion of the beauty of Christmas, and the joy there is in the "Christmas feeling."
Just so every one at the birthday party of the absent guest exclaimed with delight at all the pleasures provided, although the essential spirit of the occasion contradicted directly the qualities of the man whose birthday it was supposed to honor.
How often we may hear women in the railway cars talking over their Christmas shopping:—