Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 December 1898 — THE FIRST CHRISTMAS GIFT. [ARTICLE]

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS GIFT.

Make Your Gift a Pure One, and Give It with Love. “If you had the wealth of the world you could not equal that first Christinas gift,” writes Ruth Ashmore in an article on “Girls and Their Christmas-Giving,” in the Ladies’ Home Journal, “And you can only imitate it by making your gift a pure one, and giving it with love. You want to share, this Christmastide, your faith, your hope and your charity with those you love. You want to make your very ‘goodmorning’ tell of that good morning that came so many hundred years ago when the little Child first wakened on this earth. You want to think of the gifts that were brought to Him and what they typified. You want to have your heart full of joy. and love, and hope —so full that it will brim over and the rest of the world share it with you. Y’ou want to tell, in your speech and in your eyes, and from your heart, of the gladness of the time. You want to make this gladness go out to some one who is in grief. These are the days when you must needs give of your good

things, and among all your possessions there is nothing so good as a belief in God and a hope for the future. That was what the little Child came to tell about. Surely the Christmastide is the feast of all others that appeals to women, and as the story is told' again and again by the bells as they ring, by the carols as they are sung, by the preacher from the pulpit, we know that ‘Unto us a Child was born,’ and peace and good will reign all over the land. Let peace and good will be in your heart, and from you they will go and spread all over the land. It is to the women, thank God, that the happiness of the Christmastide specially comes. And women are generous, else one of them never would have given her Son to die that all might live. She gave to all the world her only Son—the gift that meant eternal life.”