The best gifts of love are those which show a lovely lack of common sense. Flowers (they fade, don't they?) a bracelet (invariably a nuisance). It is usually on the twenty-fifth anniversary that a husband gives a vacuum cleaner or a Mix Master.

     There is a high precedent for all this. The first Christmas gift was highly inappropriate--a Baby in a barn. Who wanted that? No one clapped his hands and said, "Goody, goody, just what I wanted!" That is, no one except a few souls who could really see--Simeon and Anna in the Temple, some shepherds, His mother.

They were all looking for a king

To slay their foes and lift them high.

Thou cam'st a little baby thing

To make a woman cry.   

 

from Like a Mighty Army

By Halford E. Luccock

So long as there are homes to which men turn

At close of day;

So long as there are homes where children are,

Where women stay--

If love and loyalty and faith be found

Across those sills, 

A stricken nation can recover from

Its gravest ills.

So long as there are homes where fires burn

And there is bread;

So long as there are homes where lamps are lit

And prayers are said;

Although people falter through the dark--

And nations grope--

With God himself back of these little homes--

We have sure hope.

--Grace Noll Crowell