The Christmas of the Heart

“During the Christmas season,” writes Dr. Dennis Merritt Jones, “love seems to live closer to the surface of our lives. Love seems more accessible at this time of year, and it is easier to give and receive when we are open to the experience.

“This is when we enter the Christmas of the heart, which is the doorway that leads to our deepest self.”

In the December 2019 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine, Jones examines the consciousness of the Christmas season. “Christmas Day,” he writes, “seem to magically open a deep portal in the collective consciousness connecting us with a sense of the sacred. What makes it a holy day is our heightened awareness and faith in something greater than ourselves, something we all have in common.”

In a challenge to readers to imbue each day with the heart of Chrismas, he asks: “Can you imagine your life, your home, your workplace and your world with that much love, kindness , generosity, forgiveness, peace and joy 365 days of the year?”

There’s a Day for That

Each year brims over with days of celebration. From traditional holidays to days of remembrance, the calendar can barely contain the ways in which we celebrate our lives.

This December, in additional to celebrating the high holy days, you can also find these:

• Monday, December 9, International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime History
• Tuesday, December 10, Human Rights Day
• Friday, December 13, International Cocoa  Day
• Sunday, December 15, Bill of Rights Day
• Wednesday, December 18, International Migrants Day
• Saturday, December 21, Winter Solstice

Find a day to celebrate the best in all of us. Visit https://www.wincalendar.com/Holiday-Calendar/December-2019.

Celebrate Winter

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: It is the time for home.

— Edith Sitwell

The Sweet Simplicity of Remembrance

— Ernest Holmes

Christmas is for remembrance. The love manifesting through our gifts to each other typifies the offer of Life, the givingness of Spirit to Its creation. The hands of the Eternal are outstretched through our hands, and the heart of the Infinite beats in the human breast.

But the giver must give of himself, for the gift without the giver is bare. It is not, then, in lavish gifts that we find true giving but in the sweet simplicity of remembrance, in the kindly thought, the tolerant mind and the gentle act.

Love alone can give love, sympathy alone can sympathize, and only goodness can really do or be good.

— Excerpted from Dr. Ernest Holmes’ Christmas letter.