Secret of Christmas, 118 Years Ago, Still Rings True
This unusual editorial appeared in the Christmas Eve 1900 issue of The Daily Colonist.
Although the Boer War was raging in South Africa the editor, one of a profession notorious for its cynicism, saw the birth of the new century as cause for hope, for peace, for progress for all humankind.
That the 20th century, so recently our century, didn’t unfold as he predicted, speaks more against the frailty and failures of humankind than it does the unnamed editor’s idealism.
He also alludes to a short-lived secular approach to Christmas by the leading American children’s periodicals of the day—a naysayer’s approach that we’ve seen repeated in modern times and which, too, now appears to be fading away. (i.e. ‘Christmas’ is back!)
History has proved our unnamed editor to be a poor prophet but it hasn’t sullied the idealism of his eloquently expressed ‘secret’ of Christmas…
“There is food for thought in the fact that the close of the 19th century sees the world girdled with Christmas festivities as it has never been at any time in its history. Whatever may be our idea of the event which transpired Bethlehem of Judea, some 1900 years ago, we must stand in awe before the amazing fact just mentioned. People have grown very fond in the course of the last half-century of what they call philosophy.
Specially are they proud of their doctrine of cause-and-effect. What is the cause? Science with its dissecting knife, its microscope, its test tubes, its telescope and its balances, has been picking Nature to pieces, and on half a dozen occasions during the lifetime of men of middle age it has been on the point, so we have been told, of overturning and casting down to oblivion all that make a basis for the Christmas festival.
Yet the lustre of the day is as great as ever, and its foundations seem to have become more deeply imbedded in the human heart. Apply your test of philosophy to this, and see what conclusions it will bring to you.
Many of us can remember when a vigourous onslaught was made upon that great and wonderful person, Santa Claus. Why, it is a fact that a very prominent children’s publication, perhaps the most prominent in America, refused Christmas stories and verses in which this personage was mentioned, the reason being given that it was not considered desirable to perpetrate what the wise editor was pleased to call a myth, and scarcely less prominent children’s periodicals followed its example.
How completely these wise incumbents of editorial chairs reckoned without their hosts may be judged from the fact that almost all periodical literature is today ablaze with pictures of the old man with his bundle of toys, and Christmas poetry who is as welcome in the sanctums as flowers in May. What does it all mean?
There is no effect without a cause, say the wise men whose books weigh down the library shelves, heavy with guesses at truth. Get out your dissecting knives, your microscopes, your test tubes, your telescope and balances, O ye man of Science with the biggest kind of ‘S,’ and find the cause of this thing.
When you have searched until you are tired, throw all your appliances aside and ask an answer from the heart of a little child.
You have learned to cut the light from distant nebulae into fragments and tell from what star dust is made of; but in all your laboratories and workshops have nothing which tells you of Love. “As the wind bloweth and you cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit,” and to be born of the Spirit is to have Love animate your whole life.
And this is the secret of Chrismas—this is the cause of the wonderful effect just spoken of. For the world is growing better. Nations still fight, because moral force is not yet strong enough to take the place of physical force; but war is concluded on more humane methods than ever before. [Sic!] Poverty still exists, but the general standard is being elevated. Vice is still only too famililar, but it is from year to year losing its apparent respectability. Agencies working for the betterment of man are being multiplied. Schooling standards are higher.
Life, liberty and property are far safer than ever before in history. Traffic in human flesh is almost at an end everywhere, and last, but by no means least, women’s place in the social scale is vastly improved. Progress in this direction may reasonably be expected to be more rapid in the future. (This time, he got it right!—TW.)
Great as has been the advance during the last 50 years it will appear small by comparison with what the next half-century will bring forth.
Speaking of men individually, each Christmas ought to see them better than the last. The festival has been badly spent if it does not make us feel more kindly, for the time at least, towards our fellows. It is pre-eminently the season of good will. In these practical days no angel chorus may salute our ears with a song, but, if we choose, our lives may be vocal with an anthem of ‘Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth Peace, good will to men.’
If they aren’t the fault is our own. We should at once attune our lives aright, and the keynote is Love—the fulfilling of Love, the greatest force in the Universe of God, the lesson of Christmastide.”
Yes, if we grade our prophet on his prescience, over all he’d get an E. (Who, in 1900, wouldn’t?) He didn’t foresee two world wars or the Great Depression that devastated the economies of the western world for a decade. White slavery is as bad as it’s ever been and much of the third world is still hungry but, yes, women have come a long way since 1900.
So, too—or so I’d like to think—has the spirit of Christmas as it’s meant to be.
His crystal ball may have been clouded. But his belief that the ‘secret’ of Christmas is greater than science, greater than skeptics’ dismissal of Santa Claus, and that Love is the greatest gift of all, hits the mark.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
