This week, let's all indulge one final time for a mindful pause in consideration of the season and take some advice from former Times editor, Craig Weir, who offered the following opinion in the Dec. 24, 1964, edition:
“Since Christmas is essentially a ‘giving’ season – for Christian people, the commemoration of the greatest gift mankind ever received – it would be useful this weekend to make a quiet re-appraisal of our own ‘giving’ attitudes toward the world around us.
While many of us make it such, Christmas to be worthwhile does not have to be merely an expensive spending occasion. Indeed, those who anticipate the reward of goodwill in exchange for a cash investment in the life of others, in the end will find their reward to be a highly transient one. One cannot buy loyalty and love, of the sustaining variety anyway.
If the spirit of this season, then, is to be really meaningful, and if we are to harvest a year of happiness from it, obviously we must look beyond what lies at the foot of the Christmas tree.
We could try giving ourselves, our talents and our concern, to others. We could make an investment in the dignity and security of our friends. We could resolve to dedicate more of our own time and good fortune to the upliftment of men and women around us.
How we should implement such an outlook is largely up to ourselves. One practical way in which we can do it is to show some real enthusiasm for the development of our community into a place of greater beauty and safety and order. Certainly by giving ourselves to such work, we shall succeed in the ultimate creation of a better life for this and later generations.
We could also so arrange our lives that we became a source of inspiration to our friends and not a source of dismay. We could exhibit those attitudes from which men and women may draw the strength they need in distress, the comfort in sorrow and the sense of belonging in loneliness.
Somewhere in this approach to personal giving – some people perhaps would call it love – is to be found the only and the real significance of Christmas.
A very Merry Christmas will be for those who gave of themselves and not in the hope of material return.
In Trail, if we look around us at all, we know who those people are. If this Christmas we learn to pattern our behaviour upon theirs, we shall be much better men and women in the New Year to come.”
So, this season, let’s emulate those we know who give of themselves without expectation.
We are certainly spoiled for choice in our little neck of the woods.
Merry Christmas from the Trail Museum and Archives!
Sarah Benson-Lord, manager, Trail Museum and Archives and Visitor Centre.
