Article December 19, 2011 Issue

What Christmas Means to Me

By Mary Baker Eddy

Early in 1906, The Ladies’ Home Journal asked Mary Baker Eddy if she would prepare an article on the meaning of Christmas for its December issue. She agreed to do so, but it wasn't until December 1907 that the article made its appearance in that magazine. It was then reprinted in the December 7, 1907, issue of the Sentinel. In keeping with a Sentinel tradition, we feature one of Mary Baker Eddy’s well-loved articles about Christmas.

To me Christmas involves an open secret, understood by few—or by none—and unutterable except in Christian Science. Christ was not born of the flesh. Christ is the Truth and Life born of God—born of Spirit and not of matter. Jesus, the Galilean Prophet, was born of the Virgin Mary’s spiritual thoughts of Life and its manifestation. 

God creates man perfect and eternal in His own image. Hence man is the image, idea, or likeness of perfection—an ideal which cannot fall from its inherent unity with divine Love, from its spotless purity and original perfection. 

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