What a wonderful occasion is Christmas! But how essential that the material celebration shouldn't be allowed to obscure the spiritual message of Christmas and its true meaning.
In an article entitled "What Christmas Means to Me," written for The Ladies' Home Journal, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes, "To me Christmas involves an open secret, understood by few—or by none—and unutterable except in Christian Science." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 261. The usual concept of something that is secret is that it is hidden from general awareness. And isn't this what many of the traditional Christmas observations tend to do—to obscure much of the beauty and deeper meaning of what Christmas really represents?
Students of Christian Science, as devoted followers of the Master, Christ Jesus, share with other Christians a deep interest in the nativity and seek lessons from his humble birth. They rejoice in the spiritual beauty of the Virgin Mary's pure recognition of God's fatherhood, and in the dawning upon human thought of the Christ-idea that wondering shepherds and wise men commemorated in their worship and sharing of precious gifts.
