Yule Log Tradition Fades, But Its Meaning Lives On When you've settled quietly in your easy chair before the fireplace on Christmas Eve, close your eyes for a moment, then squint them open into the flickering flames. Perhaps the elves of St. Nicholas will conjure a picture for you. They will take you back a few hundred years to another Christ mas Eve and give you a glimpse of a line of laughing, brawny men and youths hauling a huge oaken log through the snow to a reveling baronial castle. Once one of the most Important of Christmas ceremonies, this cus tom of bringing home the yule log has been, unfortunately, almost forgotten in America. Often, in the dim past, the entire trunk of a tree was used to provide Charles Lamb's famous "large, heaped-up, all-attractive fire" that was so necessary to light and laughter at Christmastide. Whole families went out to bring in the log, a carol was sung, and a prayer made for fer tility in field and fold, house end vineyard for the coming year. Almost everywhere it wai the custom to preserve a remnant of the log to kindle the new log next Christmas. Sometimes the remnant was kindled afresh on Candlemas Eve (Candlema* Day, February 2nd ) , and then quenched to be pre served as a charm against fire and other misfortunes. The ashes of the Christmas log were regarded as a universal pana cea, with properties to give fer tility to the soil, cure toothaches, prevent diseases among the ani mals, protect the house from fire and ill luck, and stave off light ning. The yule log is no more, but the spirit of Christmas prevails. And, as you open your eyes wide and look into your cheerful fire, per haps the elves of St. Nicholas will bless you. and bring good fortune to your household this year just as much as they did in years gone by. St. Nicholas Makes a Mistake St. Nicholas was resting irom his Christmas work at last, the gifts had all been given, the Holidays were past, and dozing in his arm chair, with his cat upon his knees, Old Nick found an easy ehair and took his honest ease. But something roused him quick ly! He started from his seat! A soldier bold, a maiden fair, were kneeling at his feet. "St. Nicholas!" the maiden cried, "Behold my fear ful plight! These wounds have been inflicted since that dreadful, dreadful night when you left me in the stocking of a being 1 dare not name ? " She paused. The soldier raised his voice, and said: "I blush with shame to stand before your saintship in the dress you now behold, but the way I have been treated makes my very blood run cold. I've been nursed and kissed and coddled, I've been rocked and sung to sleep; oh, were I not a soldier still I'd almost like to weep!" "Ah," mused the good St. Nich olas, "I think I understand." And he smiled a merry little smile, and The Man Who Made Our Christmas Charles Dickens found Christmas . a feast of roast duck and turkey, 1 He left it a festival of human kind liness. More than any other one i man, Dickens is responsible for the < restoration of Christmas to its orig- i inal spiritual significance. I coughed behind his hand. "'Twas on that busy Christmas Eve when all was in a whirl; this doll was given to a boy, this soldier to a girl." And then aloud he gravely said, "1 grieve to see your pain, but if you'll stay with me a year, all shall be well again. Next Christmas Eve, my children, when ? you are well and strong, I will put you in the stockings where you really do belong." "I wonder where my soldier is!" cried gentle little Moll; and Bobby gazing round him sobbed. "Where is my baby-doll?" But though they hunted high and low, and searched both far and near, the maiden and the soldier bold were seen no more that year. ? J. McDermott (Reprint). He could not, being the man he ivas, have done otherwise. The sym pathies of Dickens embraced every thing human. He laughed at his characters, scolded and loved them, and in book after book he com bined the tenderness, the mirth, and the indignation that made up their nature. His indignation was aimed at selfishnes, inertia, and stupidity, and when he found these things surrounding the Christmas season, he swept them away with a startling, revolutionary, and haunt ing book, "A Christmas Carol." The "Carol" has become a tra- 1 iition. But in the author's own I time it was a sedation. Long be fore Dickens was born, the Merry England of earlier days had disap peared. The Puritan suppression of the Christian celebration had broken the continuity of rejoicing. So people ate. They ate enormous ly. But they had forgotten the fel lowship of good will that we today regard as the very spirit of Christ mas. In that time, manufacturing was enjoying its first successes, and was crude, cruel, and blatant. There actually were men like the grasp ing partners, Scrooge and Marley. Toward such men, Dickens hurl ed the challenge of Marley's self reproachful lament. "Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the big ocean of my business." Nothing could be more expres sive of Dickens' own attitude than the words he put in Marley's mouth. Their expensiveness, their touch of extravagance, their sweeping nobil ity. are as fresh and significant to day as when the Ink was still wet on the pen that wrote them. To the world at large, Dickens' "Carol" restored the spirit of 1 ? Breakdown an Breakdowns Cuthbert, Ga.