It seemed unendurable that the anniversary of the birthday of Jesus should be permitted to wreck the happiness of so many hearts and homes. If Christmas stands for anything it stands for joy. “Peace and good will”—this is the heart of Christmas. The first Christmas was ushered in by a burst of song, and the last Christmas to be celebrated on our planet will no doubt dawn in the same heavenly way. “Peace on earth, good will toward men,” so the angels sang, and keep on singing, and will continue to sing forever. “Do not be afraid,” said the visitor from the skies, “for I bring you good tidings of great joy.” Fear was banished when Jesus came, and so were all the dark and dismal spectres of the mind. The shepherds were glad, and so were the aged saints in the temple, and so were the scholars from the East, and so was everybody—except Herod—who came to know of the arrival of the wonderful baby. Human hearts began to sing when Jesus came, and nothing must be allowed to reduce the volume or the sweetness of the music. What is wrong, I asked, with Christmas that it has become a sort of discord in the harmony of the year? Why should the one most lustrous day of all the months loom dark and terrible before so many eyes? Why should pain and sorrow flow like swollen and dismal streams from a day created by infinite love for making human hearts rejoice? On investigation I discovered that Christmas had simply become too small to accommodate the Christmas sentiment of the world. The dimensions of the palace were not sufficiently spacious to allow all of us to get in without treading on one another. One day was not large enough for the celebration of the birth of Jesus. Twenty-four hours were not sufficient to allow everybody to practise the precept of Jesus, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” The Christmas heart had outgrown the narrow limits of the Christmas day, and the problem of the world in the first decade of the twentieth century was, How can Christmas be enlarged? The query raised a host of interesting questions wherever it was propounded. Men began to ask, Is it possible to expand the limits of Christmas, to extend the dimensions of its golden rooms, to widen the area on which it stands? For instance, would it be possible to make Christmas cover two days instead of one? How would it do to say that Christmas is the 24th and 25th of December, or the 25th and 26th of December? At first glance one would declare that this is quite impossible, for the reason that Jesus was born on the 25th of December and therefore we have no right to include in our Christmas celebration any other day. But right here we face a curious and puzzling fact. Nobody knows on what particular day of December Jesus of Nazareth was born.