Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, decades before our contemporary culture wars and the complaints about its commercialization, T.S.

Eliot described various perspectives about Christmas in a poem called The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. It is a poem

worthy of Advent reflection. And I quote, there are several attitudes towards Christmas, some of which

we may disregard, the social, the torpid, the patently commercial, the rowdy, the pubs being open till

midnight, and the childish, which is not that of the child, for whom the candle is a star,

and the gilded angel spreading its wings at the summit of the tree, is not only a decoration,

but an angel. The child wonders, at the Christmas tree, let him continue in the spirit of wonder,

at the feast as an event not accepted as a pretext, so that the glittering rapture, the amazement of

the first remembered Christmas tree, so that the surprises, delight, and new possessions, each one with

its peculiar and exciting smell, the expectation of the goose or turkey and the expected awe

on its appearance, so that the reverence and the gaiety may not be forgotten in

later experience, in the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, the awareness of death,

the consciousness of failure, or in the piety of the convert, which may be tainted with a

self-conceit, displeasing to God and disrespectful to children. And here I remember also with

gratitude St. Lucy,

her Carol, and her crown of fire, so that before the end, the 80th Christmas, by 80th meaning

whichever is last, the accumulated memories of annual emotion may be concentrated into a great joy,

which shall also be a great fear, as on the occasion when fear

came upon every soul, because the beginning shall remind us of the end, and the first coming

of the second coming, end quote. Yes, that poem is one that you will have to read again,

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