I believe in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. - Halford E. Luccock

A lady, who looked like an animated Christmas tree with packages dangling from every limb, and I bumped and spilled. As I was trying to pick up the packages she gasped out, “Oh, I hate Christmas, anyhow ! It turns everything upside down.” I said, “That is just what it was made for.” But this lofty sentiment did not stop her dirty looks at all. But it is the big thing about Christmas! Christmas is a story about a baby, and that is a baby's chief business, turning things upside down. It is gross slander on babies that their chief passion is food. It is rearrangement! Every orthodox baby rearranges everything he sees, or can get his little hooks into, from the order of who's important in the family, to the dishes on the table. A baby in a family divides time into two eras, just as Christmas does. There is B.C., which means "before child," and A.D., which means "after deluge."

The aim of preaching is not the elucidation of a subject, but the transformation of a person … Our task is … the sharing of intense faith and experience.

Charles Lamb, in one of his most delightful essays, sets high worth on the observance of All Fools' Day, because it says to a man: "You look wise. Pray correct that error!" Christmas brings the universal message to men: "You look important and great; pray correct that error." It overturns the false standards that have blinded the vision and sets up again in their rightful magnitude those childlike qualities by which we enter the Kingdom. Christmas turns things inside out. Under the spell of the Christmas story the locked up treasures of kindliness and sympathy come from the inside of the heart, where they are often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual expression in deed and word. … It is the vision of the Christ-child which enables all men to get at the best treasures of their lives and offer them for use.