This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Dec. 6, 1941.
Now that the first week of December is all but gone and the British parcels are on their way, it is time to think about Christmas here at home. The pattern of Christmas is going to change this year. The old, abundant pattern of Christmas does not fit these perilous days.
We can all see that there is something incongruous now in preparing expensive food for well-fed people who would probably rather stay at home; and buying silver dishes for people whose conscience tells them they should send some of their silver dishes to the Red Cross Superfluities stores.
No, something tells us that we will have to change our easy, extravagant ways. But nevertheless we must not allow Christmas to level down to just another day. We must keep Christmas in the sense that Scrooge kept it, after his trip with the Spirits.
Christmas is the mountain peak of our civilization, high enough to be visible to us every day in the year. The candles, the bells and the stars — symbolic of light, music and guidance — are the very essence of our way of life, now bitterly assailed in the great civil war which is devastating humanity.
I feel that there is a grave danger that Christmas may suffer a decline this year, even in the countries that are still at peace; and now is the time for us who love it to do something about it. There will be no great illuminations this year on the streets, but Christmas does not depend on display. It is an experience of the heart, not something that can be bought at a store. It is more fun to make our own decorations anyway.
I felt something had gone out of Christmas when I found tissue paper balls in red, green and white for sale on a notions counter. No factory-made ball could ever bring the thrill of the ones we made by laying a dinner plate on many folds of tissue paper and then folding, and re-folding the layers and threading the corners on a stout string, which was tied tight to make a perfect ball.
Three of these with stippled edges of gold paint suspend from a hanging lamp above the dinner table certainly brought festivity into the room, especially if there were paper chains made from red, blue and yellow sale-bills looped over the windows; and spruce boughs spangled with silver stars above the doors.
A centrepiece on the table of a log cabin, roofed with moss, with a piece of a small corn cob for a chimney, and the whole thing sprinkled with mica to give atmosphere, with pine cones at each plate to hold the place cards, which were also homemade and contained verses for each guest wherein the local interest redeemed the metre — that was a setting for a hearty time.
When the pinch of wartime is really felt, no doubt we will sharpen our wits and so recapture the resourcefulness of the pioneers. The creative worker has a charm against boredom, and often, too, against disaster. In this connection I am glad to hear that the night classes are crowded with young people, and some who are not so young, all learning to use their hands. We may become a clever, resourceful people yet, sturdy in mind and body.
Christmas, being particularly the children’s festival, draws our mind to the influences that already beat upon our children and youth. When I see the children’s pictures with their incredible speed, lightning change, their breathless excitement and absurdities, and listen to the screams of delight from the young audience, I often wonder what germ of truth or beauty our youngsters are gathering from these strange distortions.
I wonder if they are getting anything that will help them in life. I have always felt that we have overlooked one of our best avenues of approach to the mind of youth in allowing moving pictures to become purely commercial enterprises.
The London Graphic is carrying on an interesting controversy on “What should the Churches do now?” and in the last issue I see one letter urging that the cinema be harnessed to religion at once. “It could be used on Sunday afternoons with specially created pictures which would live in the mind of the children who saw them.” Only a small percentage of our children attend Sunday schools, not all homes have religious teaching, and this would seem to be a way of presenting the teaching of ethics, which could be artistic and altogether delightful.
When Hitler and his accomplices determined to dominate the world by force and deception, they had to get rid of religion, and one of their first prohibitions was directed against the celebration of Christmas. In Nora Wain’s book Reaching for the Stars, she tells of visiting a school where the children had lost their good teacher because he had allowed them to celebrate Christmas with the usual dramatization of the beautiful story.
For this he had been “sent” away and a Nazi teacher had been put in his place. One of the little girls told Mrs. Wain that they had made a pact that they would never smile at their new teacher. He was trying to be kind and good to them and had brought them presents, she said, but they would never like him and never made friends with him — that would be their brave little bit of resistance.
In your province and mine, perhaps even in our neighbourhoods, there are children who have never heard the Christmas story — never been taught to sing the Christmas hymns. Even yet, in this third year of the war, there are grownup people who have not grasped the truth that this is a war for the Christian way of life, and as a result of this we are still neglecting one of our greatest defences. When I say Christian, I mean it in the widest sense.
I believe with all my heart that the spirit of Christ is the great common denominator of humanity, deep and high and broad enough to hold us all. That is why I hope, on this coming Christmas Day, we will reach out to all the people we can in a great new spirit of friendliness.
Let Christmas be more than a family gathering this year. It may be that your Uncle Charlie and Aunt Bess with their family have always come to you for Christmas, and always had you back on New Year’s, but even so it is good to break the old moulds.
Let them entertain their own guests this year, and you do the same. Bring out the best china and the pickled pears, put all the leaves in the table, and bring in the strangers. If you look around you, you can find plenty of lonely people. Especially people from other countries.
And let it be a Christmas celebration and not just another big meal. Let there be Christmas music and stories — not forgetting the immortal story of Tiny Tim, who said he was glad to go to church on Christmas Day, perched on his father’s shoulder, “for perhaps when the people saw him and noticed that he was crippled, they would remember One who made blind men see and cripples walk.”
Our heritage of Christmas music and literature is priceless, and if we do not open it to our people, especially our children, we are cheating them out of something that we can never restore to them. There are people who would not cheat the baker or laundryman, nor even the income-tax collector, who are cheating their own children by denying them the Christian heritage which they will surely need in the years which lie ahead.
Man cannot live by bread alone. There is a craving in all men’s souls for something which endures, even though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. This inner strength comes by a heart experience which is neither inherited nor entailed — each generation has to be taught the truths of Christianity.
At this moment, if we had eyes to see the moral chaos which is spreading over the earth, we would cherish our Christian faith as fervently as the lost traveller in a northern wilderness on a stormy December day cherished his last box of matches.
Some of McClung’s columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by Canada’s Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.
