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 things are merry enough in their way, or they were once upon a time; but we plead for an honest romanticism in Christmas cards that will express something of the entrancing color and circumstance that surround us to-day.  Is not a commuter’s train, stalled in a drift, far more lively to our hearts than the mythical stage-coach?  Or an inter-urban trolley winging its way through the dusk like a casket of golden light?  Or even a country flivver, loaded down with parcels and holly and the Yuletide keg of root beer?  Root beer may be but meager flaggonage compared to mulled claret, but at any rate ’tis honest, ’tis actual, ’tis tangible and potable.  And where, among all the Christmas cards, is the airplane, that most marvelous and heart-seizing of all our triumphs?  Where is the stately apartment house, looming like Gibraltar against a sunset sky?  Must we, even at Christmas time, fool ourselves with a picturesqueness that is gone, seeing nothing of what is around us?