Of all the supernatural visitors who roused old Scrooge from his slumbers in Dickens’ immortal “Carol,” by far the most interesting was the Ghost of Christmas Present. The Past is a memory; the Future a dream; the Present is ours. With its ghost—or its spirit, to free ourselves from uncanny associations with the name—we are intimately associated: it is the key-note, or rather the theme, which determines the harmony or discord of the year.
What, then, is the spirit of our own Christmas Present? what the underlying motive and thought, the impulse that turns our population out of their comfortable homes in the snowy streets during the most inclement month of our New England year, and then as universally gathers each family circle within doors on that one supreme Day of days? which decks counter, wall, window, and altar with evergreen, type of Eternal Life; which loosens the purse-strings of rich and poor; which brings the name of Christ tenderly to the lips of young and old? With all this we have much to do. Here it is, the spirit of Christmas, analyzable or not, for good or for evil.
There is much outcry nowadays against the extravagant mysticism which pervades the observance of the day. Christmas cards have run wild with grotesque fancies. Christmas games, legends, stories, plays,—even the columns of the daily press are full of them. At this season, the compositor may keep standing the words “Christmas,” “Bethlehem,” “Christ,” so often are they called into service.
There is the mysticism, the revival of the ancient myth and folk-belief; and there is the rush of “the trade” for the pecuniary advantages of the public tender-heartedness. One man gazes at the Star until he stumbles in the highway: his neighbor stands at the gates of Bethlehem on Christmas morning and takes toll. These are the extremes, never more marked, more obtrusive, than in this year of our Lord 1898.
But between the two, hurrying over the fields toward the city by the light of the Star, and thronging through the gates toward the little manger throne, are the vast numbers of honest, earnest, sincere men and women who find at Christmastide their perplexed lives made clear, their hopes brightened, their burdens lightened, their strength renewed for the twelvemonth to come.
To the mysticism, the love for glorified myth and legend, that characterizes the Spirit of Christmas Present, they find an answering chord in their own hearts, which will not be satisfied with shallow interpretations of the day; which demands something deeper, and cannot rest content with the broken clause, “On earth peace, good will toward men,” but must echo the wonderful song that rang out over the dark hill-slopes of Judæa, “Glory to God in the highest.”
As we gather about the cradle of every wee human child, born by such wondrous miracle, so on each Christmas Eve the world gathers at the rude manger where its Baby is laid, gazing into the gentle, radiant face, and whispering, “There is born this day a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord!”
