The Book of Christmas

Synopsis

CAROLS are still sung in almost numberless churches, lights glow on altars bound and wreathed with spruce and holly, trees are set up in innumerable homes, and mobs of merry children sing and dance around them, stockings take on grotesque shapes and hang gaping with treasures for early marauders on Christmas morning, and hosts of men and women keep the day in their hearts in all peace and piety.

The festival, dear to the heart of sixty generations, has survived the commercial uses which it has been compelled to serve; the weariness of buying and selling in the vast bazaar of nations, stocked with all manner of things which stimulate the offerings of friendship; the wide-spread sense of irony which success without happiness breeds; the indifference of feeling and satiety of emotion fostered by great prosperity without that grace of culture which subdues wealth to the finer uses of life. 

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