Article December 24, 1966 Issue

An Eternal Christmas

MAX DUNAWAY

As a small boy the writer used to think that Christmas should come more often than once a year. It seemed too wonderful an occasion to confine it to just one short day each year. Why shouldn't we have two or three Christmases a year? he wondered. Indeed why shouldn't we have Christmas every day of the year?

Years later, when he became a student of Christian Science, the writer learned with much satisfaction that Mrs. Eddy writes approvingly of an eternal Christmas. She says: "An eternal Christmas would make matter an alien save as phenomenon, and matter would reverentially withdraw itself before Mind. The despotism of material sense or the flesh would flee before such reality, to make room for substance, and the shadow of frivolity and the inaccuracy of material sense would disappear."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 260:}

While this sense of Christmas differs from that of the writer's childhood dreams, it has come to have far deeper importance for him. When "the despotism of material sense or the flesh yields to the spiritual sense of substance and being, mankind will find that nothing real has been lost but that much has been gained. How often the anticipation of a joyous Christmas has failed to be realized because some element of "the despotism of material sense" has prevented it! Only as material sense yields to the joyous expression of spiritual qualities is true happiness realized.

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