The Christmas season is lengthening. In our shopping centers, Christmas used to wait in the wings for Thanksgiving. It now begins in July with the catalogs that the mail carrier feeds through my mail drop. But limitless Christmas is not found in its expanded commercial dimensions. My Christmas is unlimited, without beginning and without end, because I have learned to celebrate it year-round by Christian Science healing.
For years I confronted Christmas with no grace in my heart. Then one day, in an unjolly moment, I pulled a little book off the shelf. An unused wedding gift, it was Christ and Christmas by the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. It offered me a new view: primitive Christmas, stripped of the demands of society.
I wondered what this poem of Mrs. Eddy's would have been like if it had been set to music and included in the Christian Science Hymnal. But Christ and Christmas never became a hymn. Instead of music, pictures "sang" the message. At first I was disappointed in the art, so I ignored it. I liked the poetry, though, and the Bible quotations that related to each stanza. The glossary of the poem lists them.
