Editorial December 18, 2017 Issue

The significance of Christmas

Mary Baker Eddy

Editor’s Note: This Christmas season, we share this piece by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. It was written for the New York World magazine and is included in What Christmas Means to Me and Other Christmas Messages, a compilation of writings on Christmas by Mrs. Eddy. It can also be found in the archives of JSH-Online.com in the December 16, 1905, issue of this magazine and is published in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany on pages 259–260.

Certain occasions, considered either collectively or individually and observed properly, tend to give the activity of man infinite scope; but mere merry-making or needless gift-giving is not that in which human capacities find the most appropriate and proper exercise. Christmas respects the Christ too much to submerge itself in merely temporary means and ends. It represents the eternal informing Soul recognized only in harmony, in the beauty and bounty of Life everlasting,—in the truth that is Life, the Life that heals and saves mankind. 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.

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