It is comparatively easy to recognize the truth, but it is quite another thing to habitually recognize your own disobedience to it, and compel yourself to shun that disobedience, and so habitually to obey,—­and to obey it is our only means of treating the truth with real respect.  When you ask a man, about holiday time, how his wife is, not uncommonly he will say:—­

“Oh, she is all tired out getting ready for Christmas.”

And how often we hear the boast:—­

“I had one hundred Christmas presents to buy, and I am completely worn out with the work of it.”

And these very women who are tired and strained with the Christmas work, “put on an expression” and talk with emotion of the beauty of Christmas, and the joy there is in the “Christmas feeling.”

Just so every one at the birthday party of the absent guest exclaimed with delight at all the pleasures provided, although the essential spirit of the occasion contradicted directly the qualities of the man whose birthday it was supposed to honor.

How often we may hear women in the railway cars talking over their Christmas shopping:—­

“I got so and so for James,—­that will do for him, don’t you think so?”

And, when her companion answers in the affirmative, she gives a sigh of relief, as if to say, now he is off my mind!

Poor woman, she does not know what it means to give herself with her gift.  She is missing one of the essentials of the true joy of Christmas Day.  Indeed, if all her gifts are given in that spirit, she is directly contradicting the true spirit of the day.  How many of us are unconsciously doing the same thing because of our—­habit of regarding Christmas gifts as a matter of conventional obligation.

If we get the spirit of giving because of Him whose birthday it is, we shall love to give, and our hearts will go out with our gifts,—­ and every gift, whether great or small, will be a thoughtful message of love from one to another.  There are now many people, of course, who have this true spirit of Christmas giving, and they are the people who most earnestly wish that they had more.  Then there are many more who do not know the spirit of a truly thoughtful gift, but would be glad to know it, if it could once be brought to their attention.

We cannot give in a truly loving spirit if we give in order that we may receive.

We cannot give truly in the spirit of Christmas if we rush and hurry, and feel strained and anxious about our gifts.

We cannot give truly if we give more than we can afford.

People have been known to give nothing, because they could not give something expensive; they have been known to give nothing in order to avoid the trouble of careful and appropriate selection:  but to refrain from giving for such reasons is as much against the true spirit of Christmas as is the hurried, excited gift-making of conventionality.