SOME YEARS AGO when our children were young, my sister's family would travel a long distance to be with us at Christmas. It was a very happy time for cousins to share, and our children greatly anticipated it. Each year they prepared a short play, sometimes the nativity, or short readings, which they performed. As they grew and studied music, the event evolved into a concert, which remains a family tradition today.
This feast of Soul soon became a cherished occasion for me, carrying more joy than any gift-giving or special holiday meal could deliver. In an article written for the Ladies' Home Journal entitled "What Christmas Means to Me," Mary Baker Eddy said: "I celebrate Christmas with my soul, my spiritual sense, and so commemorate the entrance into human understanding of the Christ conceived of Spirit, of God and not of a woman—as the birth of Truth, the dawn of divine Love breaking upon the gloom of matter and evil with the glory of infinite being" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 262). Frequently, however, one or more of the kids, and occasionally an adult, developed flu-like symptoms that attempted to put a damper on the holiday. Once it was even a family pet!
It was then that my sister and I, both of us raised in Christian Science and familiar with turning to God for all of our health care, decided we needed to do better preparation for the holidays, a spiritual preparation of thought, putting down—and eliminating—any suggestions that contagion could be allowed entrance to this celebration of the coming of the Christ to human consciousness.
