DEAR TIME-READER

It is nearly 25 years now since the first TIME readers found what a satisfaction it was to have their friends and relations be TIME-readers, too. For them, giving a subscription to TIME as a present at Christmas has long been the surest and most thoughtful way of sharing their own enjoyment of TIME--and of producing reactions like the following one, which came in with a gift order from an Oakland, California reader:

"TIME first came to me as a Christmas gift because one of my friends thought I was missing something--and I was!"

Over the years their weekly habit of reading TIME has built up a communality of interest among our readers. They tell us that TIME has become their frame of reference, that its news stories not only provoke intelligent, active discussion and supply the facts upon which it is based, but also provide a bond of broad interest for immediate conversation wherever TIME readers meet.

For the benefit of all concerned, some readers have even tried to share TIME with their enemies. In this connection, I am thinking particularly of the war years and of an elderly gentleman named Thorwald Gustaffsen, a citizen of Stockholm, who, from 1936 until the war closed in on him in 1942, regularly sent us his Christmas gift order. It was always addressed to the same three people because, as he put it: "They need a clear, true, balanced story of the news more than any other three men in the world." The three were the late Adolf Hitler, the late Benito Mussolini, and the Emperor of Japan.

Another reader, a thrifty Iowa farmer's wife, liked to give TIME to as many friends as possible. Her way of paying for these gift subscriptions was to choose one of her sows which was in a family way and, when the sow littered, to sell its offspring and send the money to us with a list of the friends she wanted TIME sent to.

Each year, too. the reappearance in the mails of an old slogan lets us know that the Christmas gift season really is at hand and that some of you are thinking about it. This year, as usual, some of you have already submitted: "There's no time like the present for a present like TIME." It is a slogan we used frequently many years ago when TIME was very young, and it is apparently so inevitable that readers recreate it every year.

The custom of giving TIME for Christmas has moved many of you to remember friends, relations, associates in all categories with a gift of TIME. For instance, a Camden, NJ. attorney wrote us: "Among those whom I want to remember at Christmas are my nephew at college, a lawyer associate, a doctor, a clergyman, a salesman, my barber, a school teacher, an automobile mechanic, and a radio repair man. For all of them, a subscription to TIME fills the bill to perfection."

If you decide to send TIME to people like these, or to any others on your Christmas list, a postage paid air mail order card showing our special Christmas rate is bound into this issue. Please try to airmail it back to me today.

Thank you-- and let me be the first to wish you . . .

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