our tongue immortally associate with the
season--the pages of Charles Dickens. Love of humanity endures as long
as the thing it loves, and those pages are packed as full of it as a
pound cake is full of fruit. A pound cake will keep moist three years; a
sponge cake is dry in three days.

And now humanity has its most beautiful and most appropriate Christmas
gift--Peace. The Magi of Versailles and Washington having unwound for us
the tissue paper and red ribbon (or red tape) from this greatest of all
gifts, let us in days to come measure up to what has been born through
such anguish and horror. If war is illness and peace is health, let us
remember also that health is not merely a blessing to be received intact
once and for all. It is not a substance but a condition, to be
maintained only by sound regime, self-discipline and simplicity. Let the
Wise Men not be too wise; let them remember those other Wise Men who,
after their long journey and their sage surmisings, found only a Child.
On this evening it serves us nothing to pile up filing cases and rolltop
desks toward the stars, for in our city square the Star itself has
fallen, and shines upon the Tree.

CHRISTMAS CARDS

By a stroke of good luck we found a little shop where a large overstock
of Christmas cards was selling at two for five. The original 5's and
10's were still penciled on them, and while we were debating whether to
rub them off a thought occurred to us. When will artists and printers
design us some Christmas cards that will be honest and appropriate to
the time we live in? Never was the Day of Peace and Good Will so full of
meaning as this year; and never did the little cards, charming as they
were, seem so formal, so merely pretty, so devoid of imagination, so
inadequate to the festival.

This is an age of strange and stirring beauty, of extraordinary romance
and adventure, of new joys and pains. And yet our Christmas artists have
nothing more to offer us than the old formalism of Yuletide convention.
After a considerable amount of searching in the bazaars we have found
not one Christmas card that showed even a glimmering of the true
romance, which is to see the beauty or wonder or peril that lies around
us. Most of the cards hark back to the stage-coach up to its hubs in
snow, or the blue bird, with which Maeterlinck penalized us (what has a
blue bird got to do with Christmas?), or the open fireplace and jug of
mulled claret. Now these thing