Tract Number 13

CHRIST'S GREETINGS 
A GIFT TO GIFT GIVERS AND GIFT RECEIVERS

   "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." James 1:17.

   For over nineteen centuries the institution of Christmas, the popular gift-exchanging day, has been acclaimed throughout Christendom as one of God's good and perfect gifts.  And this sentiment has been glorified and perpetuated in the face of the widely-known facts that Christmas is not the birthday of Christ, that He was not, in truth, born in December at all, that the observance of the day is simply a Christianized heathen custom perpetuated in charming Christian guise, and that it is not a gift from God.

   "The Christmas Spirit was traced back in history today," says an associated press dispatch under date line of Chicago, December 23, 1935 "and identified as a one-time 'public enemy.'" 

   "Branded a pagan outlaw, it was banished from New England by the Puritans in 1659.

   "Yule gaiety and feasting so irked those solemn pillars of the church, declared Prof. William  Warren Sweet, University of Chicago church historian, that they passed a law in the general court of the colony of Massachusetts saying:

   " 'Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, as a festival, shall be fined five shillings.'

   "Only during the last half century was the Christmas spirit generally accepted in America, even in the  church, Professor Sweet asserted."

   In view of these widely-known historical facts, this phase of the subject needs no further treatment beyond the Lord's simple warning involving Christmas Observance and Christmas Gifts.