We are waiting. We have not forgotten.

"So, it seems that the true Christmas, like the kingdom of heaven, of which, indeed, it is a part, is within us. It is the hour of charitable thoughts and active service. It is our season of vision, when eyes are anointed to see how easy it is to bestow it. To most if us, indeed, an underlying sadness must deepen a little by contrast with the external joy. We think of those past Christmases of our youth, each of which in turn was to have seen us great, or rich, or famous, or noble, or happy, with the fulfillment of some desire which was never to be satisfied. We think of the friends whose greeting was the best of Christmas to us, and whose voices we shall hear no more. Filling the children's stockings, we long unutterably for the child who was to grow up only in the life to come. But these aspirations, ambitions, loves are not dead. Let us not try to forget, but give all a place at our Christmas fire, rich, very rich, in what we have, far richer in what we fancy we have lost.

-from "Christmas Past and Present," Harper's Bazaar, Dec. 31, 1881.