GOLD, MYRRH, DOLLS DO NOT A CHRISTMAS MAKE

Shorter and shorter grow the days. Some of them seem to end by half past four, before quitting time for most workers. Such days slink into darkness with wet feet and a damp chill. Blue skies and fleecy clouds are scarce and were it not for the light of this holiday month we might think it would have been wise if man, like some animals, had been created to hibernate. By spring, when we emerged, our fat would have been used up, the air might have self cleaned, the waters renewed, the hole in the ozone healed and everyone's temper would have been soothed.

Since this isn't the case we must go on living in the stinginess of the sunlight and bask in the glow of the season. The beautifully decorated streets and store windows, the sparkling homes decorated with lights, will provide a shimmer that will offset any dark, cold, drooping days.

The lights in the eyes of children, and the mind, trying to imagine that light that once fell upon the fields outside Bethlehem, add further to the man-made radiance.

Some say, mostly the people who deal with national economics, that it will be a bleak Christmas with an ominous infrequency of the cash register bells and the little beeps from underneath the grocery counter as the objects pass over the little windows.

However, I have been through bleak Christmases and I have found that something rises up in mankind to obstinately combat these predictions. It's a "Don't-tell-me-we-won't-have-a-good-Christmas" attitude.

Not long ago I bought, at a yard sale, a little metal car. It had been made of various sized washers, nuts, bolts, nails and scraps of tin cans. Four big washers were the wheels. Little nuts were the headlights. Smaller nuts were hubcaps. Deheaded nails were axles. The body, a four door affair, was cut from tin cans, shaped and glued together. Everything was in relative proportion. It ha~d been spray-painted black. So what if it didn't run on batteries or wind-up springs? Some daddy had made it. Do you think he spent the hours bemoaning the fact that it wasn't a Lionel train?

~If all the gifts that were ever given at Christmas were piled high in some sky-reaching pyramid representing love, that little black car would scintillate like a diamond in the great edifice.

One of the most appreciated gifts I ever received at what might have been perceived as a bleak Christmas was a nickel tablet, covered with a scrap of red-checked gingham and filled with hand written old family recipes, family stories, also written in longhand, drawings, and little black and white Christmas scenes cut from the county newspaper.

During the Depression (Pardon me while I lean back and reminisce a little), all the extended family who were used to exchanging gifts with everyone decided to draw names and abide by a stipulation that all gifts had to be handmade. That year I made my first cobbler's apron, cut from a tow sack. Daddy who re-soled shoes wore it for years.

This is all from a gift giving aspect of Christmas. The Wise Men who brought the gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the manger started this custom out of love and adoration. It is man who has ballooned this aspect of the events surrounding the nativity into an economic event, merchants depending largely on Christmas sales to keep afloat. The aspect that may be lagging behind the gift giving is the celebration of the Great Gift given to mankind for all time, wrapped in cloth with straw clinging to the wrappings. When we think of that Great Gift how could any season be bleak, even if there wasn't a tow sack with which to make a gift or a few nuts and bolts. This Gift is the true glow that lights up this season of chill and short days.

REJOICE!