"THE customs of Christmas are many, but none are more enduring than the creation of a creche, centered about the watching Mary and the Christ child asleep in a manger. The magnificent 18th century creche on TIME'S cover this week is one of the famous Neapolitan presepios that delighted King Charles III of Naples and his queen, who sewed garments of silk and velvet for such exquisitely wrought figurines. Using the simplest of materials--vegetable fibers on wire skeletons, wooden hands and feet, earthenware heads--noted Italian sculptors created these figures, which now enact the Christmas story in the apartment of a Neapolitan collector, where they were photographed by TIME'S David Lees. As the creche appears on TIME'S first gatefold cover picture, it symbolizes not only the spirit of the season, along with Christmas cards and Santa's sleigh bells, but also a growing resurgence of religion and worship wherever men gather at Christmastide, be it in Bethlehem or Bogota, North Viet Nam or North Hollywood, Calif.

ANOTHER innovation in TIME this week is the global year-end review of business. Research for it came from 75 on-the-spot reports from staff correspondents and stringers around the entire world. In past years the review has largely concentrated on the U.S. economy. In 1959 it was apparent that the most interesting economic story of the year was the vast spread of U.S. ideas and U.S. methods to the world, not only to the already industrialized nations of Europe, but also to scores of underdeveloped lands just beginning the long march to prosperity.

To get the story, Correspondent George Bookman went on a five-week trip to seven European countries in the course of which he interviewed 96 top government officials, economists and businessmen. His report, bolstered by additional material from TIME'S European and U.S. bureaus, brought into focus a new American-type capitalism that around the world is replacing the old system of cartels and feudal wealth. The Tokyo bureau added the story of Japan's striking progress, while the Hong Kong bureau analyzed the trials, tribulations and triumphs of Southeast Asia. As other reports poured in from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and TIME'S domestic bureaus, they added up to a year in which free-enterprise capitalism was on the march throughout the world--a thrusting, competitive capitalism that poses challenging questions for the U.S. in the 19603. As France's Jean Monnet, sparkplug of European economic unification, said near the end of 1959: "There is now a new force in world economic relations. The U.S. helped the free world, and the free world has recovered economically. Now we must all work together to make sure that economic expansion continues."

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