In the 24 December 1931 edition of the Elizabethville Echo, Elizabethville, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, the publishers gave the following optimistic Christmas message:
Christmas
This should be the most successful Christmas in our history if we try to make it so. Let us crowd hate and its kindred, suspicion and gloom, out of our hearts. Let us focus our eyes on that guiding star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode, and in the warmth of its glow rekindle in ourselves the genial flame of charity,
Let us, for the day at least, forget the things that worry us. In their places let us substitute thoughts of the many things for which we may be thankful. Let us forgive our enemies and lean more heavily upon the staff of friendship. Thus each of us will become a center of happiness and able to spread that cheer which is at the heart of Christmas observance.
No season of the year so delightfully excites one’s imagination or calls more sympathetically to one’s tenderest emotions. We do not need to be reminded that the festive occasion commemorates the announcements of the religion of peace and love, for the feeling is all around us. It expresses itself in tranquility for the old and in joyous promptings for the young.
Happiness is in the air. The penetration of the Christmas spirit encourages us in the faith that the world is growing better, for it cannot be otherwise than that the recurrent planning of such seeds year by year tends more and more toward the fruition of universal love and brotherhood.
Our greeting to you is for a merry Christmas and the wish that all of us may carry much of the spirit and blessings of the day into every other day of the year. Thus shall we draw nearer to the fulfillment of the ideal typified by Christmas.
THE PUBLISHERS
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From Newspapers.com.
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