The little boy was myself, and the incident is the first Christmas that I can recall. I recount it because it seems to illustrate the natural coalescence of the mythical idea with the historical idea of the great world holiday. Too often, I think, the real significance of our holidays is lost in the merriment of celebrating them. Every child is entitled to a thorough explanation and a lasting impression of the incident which Christmas commemorates. In shaping the Christmas idea in the boy’s mind we should begin at the beginning. If the story of the Star of Bethlehem is told in the right way and at the right time, it may be depended upon to survive the myths and the merry-making with which the atmosphere is charged during the festal period. And this need not militate against the development of the Santa Claus side of the celebration, for the one amplifies the other. Unselfish giving is the keynote to both, and the child-mind easily comprehends the application of the modern custom to the ancient story. In the bringing up of my boy I have been a stickler for truth. Absolute confidence between father and son, mother and child, has been my plea and my practice, always. Yet, while not going out of my way to encourage the Santa Claus myth, I have most cheerfully tolerated it. It is the one mystery of childhood that I do not explain, and my reason for excepting it from the calendar of candour is that the end justifies the means. I would not rob the boy of a fiction that has not one harmful possibility, and that brings so much gladness into the home, and into his heart. I would not deny him a kind of pleasure that added so much to the joy of my own childhood. But, and paramount to every other consideration, the great unassailable justification of the Santa Claus myth is the remarkable lesson it teaches. With reasonable reservations for the unusual I may say that never, after the Santa Claus age, does a man or a woman either practise or experience that remarkable unselfishness of the parents who conceal their bounteousness behind a fiction. After childhood we continue to give and take. We give to our brothers and sisters, to our parents and to all whom we love. It is our pleasure to add to their happiness; but it is also our pleasure to feel that they know it is we who have so contributed to their enjoyment. Not so in Santa Claus land. There, and there only, is found the absolute submergence of self, the sincerely impersonal benefaction. As a child, coming down to the dazzling Christmas tree, I said: “How good is Santa Claus!” But in after years when I began to realise that every one of those trees of joy had come from my good father, who had tramped out into the woods to cut them and had hauled them over the hills for miles, sometimes through a blinding blizzard,--then I said: “How great is a parent’s love!”