How do you celebrate Christmas?

If you get unreasonably caught up in the customary rituals and commercialism of the season, you perhaps feel guilty. Most of us, however good our intentions, often seem to get trapped by traditions built up over many years. This is not to say that genuine family sharing and celebration are wrong. Often these hint at something deeper.

But I have to admire the spiritually based ingenuity and great love some good friends—Christian Scientists—evidenced a few seasons back. They sent us a beautiful Christmas card, which they said would be their last. In future, they explained, the hours usually spent addressing and mailing such greetings would be put to better use—that of quietly, prayerfully recognizing and affirming the spiritual nature of man. They felt they could include all their friends and acquaintances—in fact, the whole world—in an acknowledgment of God's infinite blessings. What better way to commemorate the coming of Christ to human consciousness than to identify and appreciate the Christlikeness of the sons and daughters of God! Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, "I love to observe Christmas in quietude, humility, benevolence, charity, letting good will towards man, eloquent silence, prayer, and praise express my conception of Truth's appearing." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 262;}

Those who have caught the true vision of Christ as the Son of God, as His spiritual idea, have good reason to celebrate Christmas not just one day each year, but continually. How can we commemorate Christmas as a continuing, even daily, experience? By maintaining ceaseless receptivity to the Christ light, by keeping thought open to the ever-inspiring and constant coming of Truth to man—to the coming of God's clear, uplifting messages of infinite Love and Life.

The peace and dominion of each of God's loved ideas is uninterrupted. It is, of course, the Christly consciousness of this ever-present good that nullifies mortal belief and material sense testimony of existence in or of matter. Jesus, who supremely exemplified this Christliness, this continuing receptivity to divine Principle, also instructed us—all mankind—in how we could emulate him. "Blessed," he said, "are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." ^{Matt. 5:8;}

Those who best celebrate Christmas on a throughout-the-year basis maintain a pure sense of their selfless, sinless, matterless being. They daily defend themselves from the onslaughts of false mortal belief and regularly assert their independence of, and immunity to, the claims of mortal sense. In the article "The Significance of Christmas," which originally appeared in the New York World, Mrs. Eddy clarifies the whole subject: "The basis of Christmas is the rock, Christ Jesus; its fruits are inspiration and spiritual understanding of joy and rejoicing,—not because of fundamental and demonstrable truth, because of the heaven within us." ^{Miscellany, p. 260.}

Indeed, the true spirit of Christmas is something we can practice every day—a precious, seasonless gift we can give to ourselves and to all mankind. This ever-renewable gift of rightly identifying man individually and collectively as God's offspring—blessed now and forever, immaculate, changeless, radiating infinite perfection—is ours to receive and express.