EDMOND — Many well-known Christmas songs tell of the season’s joy, the holiday trimmings and trappings, but they do not mention the reason for the season.

Alan Day, senior pastor at the First Baptist Church of Edmond, said individuals can turn Christmas into “Xmas,” say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” and decorate “Holiday Trees” instead of Christmas trees, but those efforts are futile.

“Spoken or un-spoken, we cannot get away from the influence of Jesus Christ. We try, but unsuccessfully,” Day said.

FROM THE INGHAM PAPERS.

[When my friends of the Boston Daily Advertiser asked me last year to contribute to their Christmas number, I was very glad to recall this scrap of Mr. Ingham's memoirs.

For in most modern Christmas stories I have observed that the rich wake up of a sudden to befriend the poor, and that the moral is educed from such compassion. The incidents in this story show, what all life shows, that the poor befriend the rich as truly as the rich the poor: that, in the Christian life, each needs all.

PART I.

_A WOMAN’S PLAN._

‘My dear Mary,’ said I, one morning, to my widowed sister, as she sank into an arm chair in front of my library fire, and
heaved a sigh replete with exhaustion and sadness:

‘What is the matter?’

Making one’s true love happy will cost a whopping $87,403 this year, a minuscule increase from last year, according to the latest cost analysis of the items in the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

That’s the grand total for everything from the partridge in a pear tree to the 12 drummers drumming, purchased repeatedly as the song suggests, according to the annual Christmas Price Index compiled by PNC Wealth Management. The price is up $794, or less than 1 percent, from $86,609 last year.

Any film starring a dog and airing for holiday-season consumption raises certain expectations—the right word is probably suspicions. All are borne out in the new, mercilessly affecting Hallmark Hall of Fame production (Sunday, 9-10:30 p.m EST on CBS) titled “A Dog Named Christmas.” (The film is based on the novel of the same name by Greg Kincaid.) The plot is a gut-wrencher, though not lethally so; its hero a creature of many parts, most of them flawless. Christmas endures tribulations and trials whose outcome is never in doubt: Nothing seriously bad is going to happen to a dog named Christmas, or any other kind, in a film like this—or to his supporting cast of humans, the good people who have taken him in.