Dear Time-Reader

As many of you will recall, we have had a great variety of covers for our Christmas issues. They have included Norway's heroic Lutheran Bishop Eivind Berggrav, who at the time (1944) was a defiant and solitary prisoner of the Nazis; Marian Anderson, around whose life and career TIME'S editors told the story of the Negro spiritual; and the late Lieut. General Lesley McNair, who as chief of Army Ground Forces in 1942 was responsible for providing some measure of Christmas cheer to 3,000,000 G.I.s.

Along with these news subjects, we have had cover stories which discussed the way in which artists through the ages have depicted the real news of Christmas, the birth of Christ. There was Gerard David's painting of The Nativity in 1945 and, two years later, the Madonna and Child by Renaissance Painter Alesso Baldovinetti.

This year, for the second time, the editors chose a modern religious painting for the cover. The first, in 1938, was French-born Jean Chariot's Nativity. On this week's cover is The Gift by Fred Meyer, a young art teacher of Rochester, N.Y. who, like the other artists represented in the accompanying two color pages, has been increasingly concerned with religious art.

With this cover, all of us on TIME send you our traditional greetings and our best wishes.

Cordially yours,

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