THE STORY OF CHRISTMAS[*]

Nora A. Smith

"A great spiritual efficiency lies in story-telling".--_Froebel._


Christmas Day, you know, dear children, is Christ's day, Christ's
birthday, and I want to tell you why we love it so much, and why we
try to make every one happy when it comes each year.

A long, long time ago--more than eighteen hundred years--the baby
Christ was born on Christmas Day; a baby so wonderful and so
beautiful, who grew up to be a man so wise, so good, so patient and
sweet that, every year, the people who know about Him love Him better
and better, and are more and more glad when His birthday comes again.
You see that He must have been very good and wonderful; for people
have always remembered His birthday, and kept it lovingly for eighteen
hundred years.

He was born, long years ago, in a land far, far away across the seas.

Before the baby Christ was born, Mary, His mother, had to make a long
journey with her husband, Joseph. They made this journey to be taxed
or counted; for in those days this could not be done in the town where
people happened to live, but they must be numbered in the place where
they were born.

In that far-off time the only way of traveling was on a horse, or a