BY WALT ALBRITTON
BY WALTER ALBRITTON
OPINION —
As we say goodbye to Christmas, I want to share with you “Keeping Christmas” by Henry van Dyke. A Presbyterian pastor and professor of English literature at Princeton University, he was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1852 and died in 1933.
Throw another log on the fire. Get comfortable in your favorite chair. Then read this slowly. Let these provocative insights sink in. Resolve to follow Van Dyke’s advice. It could well be the best decision you will make as the year comes to a close.
There is a better thing than the observance of Christmas Day, and that is keeping Christmas.
Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people and to remember what other people have done for you?
To ignore what the world owes you and to think what you owe the world?
To see that your fellow men are just as real as you are?
To try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy?
To close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness?
To admit that the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life?
Are you willing to do these things, even for a day?
Then you can keep Christmas.
Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children?
To remember the weakness and loneliness of people who are growing old?
To stop asking how much your friends like you and ask yourself whether you love them enough?
To trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke,
And to carry it in front so your shadow will fall behind you?
To try to understand what those who live in the same house with you really want, without waiting for them to tell you?
To make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings?
Are you willing to do these things even for a day?
Then you can keep Christmas.
Are you willing to believe that love is the strongest thing in the world — stronger than hate, stronger than death — and that the blessed life which began in
Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago is the image and brightness of eternal love?
Then you can keep Christmas.
But you can never keep it alone.
Happy New Year.