Radio Script #400

Little Talks on Common Things

December 21, 1958

For the first time in the eleven years of this program, one of its anniversaries coincides with our annual Christmas broadcast. Tonight marks the four hundredth time that Little Talks on Common Things has gone on the air. That means that more than 600,000 words have gone out over the airwaves on this program devoted to old time things in our State of Maine.I’m sure you do not forget that this program, from its beginning eleven years ago, has had one continuous sponsor, the Keyes Fibre Company. Again I call your attention to the fact that it is one of the few programs on radio or television that is never interrupted by advertising. Only at the beginning and at the end is there even mention of the sponsor, and then there is no direct advertising. You are told simply that Keyes brings you the program as a public service.

As this Christmas week and our 400th broadcast come together, it occurs to me that we may appropriately think of one continuous Christmas present we receive here in Waterville.

What do our major industries do for this community — for the area we call Greater Waterville — the city itself and the towns of Fairfield, Oakland and Winslow? When we consider those industries all together — the Scott Paper Company, the Hathaway Company, the Wyandotte Company, the Cascade Woolen Company, the Diamond Company, the textile mill at Fairfield, and the Keyes Fibre Company — to say nothing of the Maine Central shop and the smaller factories in the area — we know that these communities would see a sorry Christmas without them.

What all of these industries are doing for the welfare of citizens in these towns and even beyond the immediate area is well illustrated by the Keyes Fibre Company. Anyone of the larger companies could be just as easily taken to make my point, but I happen to know more about Keyes than I do about the others.

The annual payroll of the Keyes Fibre Company is about three and a half million dollars. It gives direct employment here to 880 persons. The Bureau of the Census tells us that the average size of a Waterville family is three and a half persons, though I admit it is difficult to visualize what half a person looks like. Anyhow that average applied to the Keyes payroll means that some three thousand persons are directly benefited by food, shelter, goods and services from the Keyes distribution of three and a half million dollars a year.

Now let us see what that money does to benefit people outside the Keyes family. Food costs the average Waterville family $1,800 a year. Therefore, of Keyes’ three and a half million dollar payroll, nearly a million and a half is spent in the food stores. Then every family has to have clothes, furnishings, and other goods. Some of them must pay rent, others are paying on mortgaged homes, and all are paying taxes of some kind. They need the services of doctors, dentists and lawyers, barbers and beauticians. And most of them contribute regularly to their favored church. Moreover, these working people give away a surprising amount of money during the year. They help maintain the welfare organizations and they contribute to many another worthy cause.

Keyes, as well as other industries, gives both money and time to civic affairs. The company contributes directly to the Community Chest, to civic organizations, and to many local and state educational activities. On company time, a number of employees give aid to civic projects. All together, the industrial firms of the Waterville area, with their employees, pay more than half of all contributions made to the Community Chest.

Not the least of industry’s share in the community is the payment of taxes. One dollar in every five paid to the tax collector in Waterville comes from Waterville’s industries, and it is much the same in the neighboring communities. But our industries have a wider impact than upon the local area. Although Keyes is by no means the largest of Maine industries, the company spends more than two and a half million dollars every year within the State of Maine, in addition to its 3t million payroll. Therefore, every year this one company is putting into circulation among Maine people a total of more than six million dollars, which is an average of more than six dollars for every living soul in Maine. Keyes is just one, medium sized industry. Add the contributions of all industries in Maine and you can understand how Maine industry is something for which we should be profoundly grateful in this Christmas season.

Now let us think a bit about Christmas itself, as we have done on this December broadcast in each of the past ten years. On those broadcasts we have talked about Santa Claus and the Christmas tree, about the development of the day made by adapting an ancient pagan festival to the Christian observance of the Saviour’s birth. But I don’t recall that we have mentioned the use of evergreens in connection with Christmas. Because they flourish when other plants are brown and dead, and when other trees are bare of leaves, evergreens have long been considered symbols of enduring life. At the time of the shortest day of the year, our primitive ancestors used evergreens in magic ceremonies to assure the return of vegetation in the coming spring. In ancient Rome, at that same season of the winter solstice, houses were decorated with laurel.

For many centuries Christian homes and Christian churches have displayed greenery at Christmas time. Holly, ivy and mistletoe had always been the favorite decorations. Mistletoe. which the classical legends refer to as the Golden Bough, was considered a sacred plant by both the Druids and by the Norsemen, like Leif Ericson and his father, Eric the Red, the first known white explorers of our New England coast. Interestingly enough, mistletoe is the one Christmas green that never completely lost its original pagan character. Alone of all the evergreens, it was never used in the decoration of churches throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when church decoration was at its height.

Did you know that kissing under the mistletoe is unknown outside of English- speaking countries, except in parts of the world where a strong British influence has been made by English settlers? So recent is the emergence of Christmas greenery from houses, churches and stores out into the street, that persons who remember that such a thing seldom happened in their childhood may think it a comparatively new custom. But it is a very old one. Samuel Pepys, the sixteenth century diarist, tells us that in London in his day lithe conduits and standards in the streets were decorated at Christmas time. Modern visitors to Boston will recall the miniature scenes erected in the Public Gardens, depicting Christmas in Boston in the eighteenth century. At that time, doors, whole house fronts, lamp posts, and other outside objects were gaily decorated.

Did you know that the present wide-spread custom of the community Christmas tree began in 1909, when the people of Pasadena, California set up an illuminated tree on the top of Mount Wilson? In 1912 a big tree appeared in the park at Madison Square, New York, and in 1933 began the annual custom of setting up a tree at Rockefeller Center. As you know, in this 25th anniversary year of the Center’s Christmas observance, the tree has come from a farm in East Madison, Maine. Every year since 1947, London’s big Christmas tree, set up in Trafalgar Square, has been the gift of the grateful people of Norway for Britain’s aid in the Second World War.

The out-of-doors creche, set up on the lawns of homes, churches, and public buildings, oddly enough spread over our country from west to east, being popular,on the west coast before it was at all common on the Atlantic seaboard. There is a tradition that the manger scene was depicted out of doors in the early Spanish missions of California.

Light and fire have long been associated with Christmas, reminding us that Christ is the light of the world. In parts of rural England one still sees the Christmas Candle of olden times. It was so large that it would burn throughout Christmas Day. If it burned out or was accidentally blown out, the family would have bad luck all through the coming year. A beautiful Christmas custom associated with light and fire has prevailed in Syria for many centuries and is still preserved. On Christmas Eve the family, carrying lighted candles, stands around an unlit bonfire in the courtyard. After the youngest has read the Gospel story, the father lights the fire. When it finally dies down, everyone present jumps over the embers, making a wish as he does so. On Christmas morning, before daylight, everybody goes to church. There another bonfire is lit, and a figure of the Christ Child is carried around the building.

In some parts of the world persons are not the only living things remembered at Christmas time. Animals and birds come in for recognition. Cattle and horses are given extra rations, and in Bavaria the horses are even offered big pails of beer. In Sweden sheafs of wheat are placed on high poles for the wild birds, and in parts of Hungary the last sheaf of the harvest is especially set aside for the birds on Christmas Day.

Christmas carols were originally dance songs — a ring dance accompanied by singing. The themes were secular, concerned with love and courtship, the round of the seasons, or simple feasting. Not until the fourteenth century was the true Christmas carol first heard. Carols were never hymns, although we often confirm them as such because they are now as frequently sung in churches, and many are included in our church hymnals. They began when St. Francis of Assisi allowed their use at a great religious festival, as a gay and cheerful expression of the salvation brought to man by the Saviour’s birth.

In England, Puritan disapproval so banished the singing of carols that not even the revolt of Charles II’s regime against the Puritan customs could restore the carol to immediate popularity. For two hundred years carol singing was seldom heard except among the simple country folk in remote villages. As late as 1825 a London writer called the old carols “ditties which now exclusively delight the industrious servant maid and the humble laborer”. But never did carol singing wholly die out. Gradually its sixteenth century popularity has been restored in our own time.

Even down under, in far-away Australia, where Christmas comes in midsummer, with no hint of snow and jingling bells, they have carols by candlelight. Christmas Eve in Melbourne sees every year more than three hundred thousand people gather in Alexandra Gardens, carrying candles in their hands. Thousands of those little flames flicker in the summer air. People of all classes and all religious faiths participate. At midnight the vast throng stand with joined hands and sing “Auld Lang Syne”, as the bells ring in the Christmas Day.

Yes, many and varied are the customs connected with Christmas. But in this day of the intense commercializing of the festival, how easy it is to forget that for which it really stands. If you will but read ancient history, of the way the peoples of the Mediterranean world lived and thought, you will see what Gibbon meant when he said that the greatest achievement of Christianity was that it brought hope to a hopeless world. In the midst of lavish Christmas gifts and of riotous Christmas parties, a still small voice reminds us that, in a cavern stable by a crowded inn in Bethlehem, there was born to the family of a humble carpenter from the no-good town of Nazareth a baby who would be the eternal expression of man’s much needed truth – that God still loves this seemingly hopeless, futile, frustrated world.

Year: 1958