We turn on all our lights, and stuff ourselves, and exchange presents, because our ancestors in the forest...chose the shortest day of the year to defy an almost triumphant darkness and declare loyalty to an almost beaten sun.
We have yet to learn..., that no matter how often man is knocked down, he will always pick himself up, punch drunk and sick and morbidly aware of his open guard, spit out some more teeth, and start slugging again.
...the new light coming into the world must be divine as well as human if the struggle is ever to be won.
Scrooge saw the air filled with fettered spirits, whose punishment it was to see the misery of others and to be unable to help...we too are unable...and we can offset our helplessness by affirming Christmas,...of what human life should be, a society raised by kindness into a community of continuous joy.
...there is now in the world a power of life which is both the perfect form of human effort and all we know of God, and which it is our privilege to work with as it spreads...until there is no one shut out from the great invisible communion of the Christmas feast. Then the wish of a merry Christmas,...will become,...a worker of miracles.
...Christmas is the only traditional festival...that retains any real hold on ordinary life...people want Christmas....because Christmas helps them to understand why they go through the bother of living out their lives the rest of the year. For one brief instant, we see human society as it should and could be, a world in which business has become the exchanging of presents and in which nothing is important except...happiness and well-being.
...Christianity speaks of making the earth resemble the kingdom of heaven, and teaches that the kingdom of heaven is within [us]. This is... the conquest of the whole year by the spirit of Christmas.
There is an unmistakable panic (something of the old pains recurring) in the advertisers' desperate appeals of "only so many shopping days left, "...
The story of Christmas, from its primitive beginnings to the present, is, in part, a story of how [we], by cowering together in the common fear of menace, discovered a new fellowship, in fellowship a new hope, and in hope and new vision of society."
...Dickens shows us,...Christmas past brings us only regret...Christmas future brings us only...terror of the future. But...to know and appreciate better the spirit of Christmas present is to wake from the nightmare of the future.
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