Christmas Without Santa Glaus

Last week in Rochester, N. Y., 160 quietly determined people celebrated Christmas and New Year's Day, both on the same day. These nonconformists call themselves the Megiddo Mission.

The Megiddos consider other people's Christmas a pagan festival, derived from the Roman Saturnalia, list 30 reasons why they are right. Sample reason: shepherds do not watch their flocks by night in Palestine's December. Other Megiddo beliefs: the planets are all inhabited by men in different stages of religious development; at the Resurrection nonbelievers will continue in the dreamless sleep called death. Rochester's 160 Megiddos are quiet, thrifty folk. None is on relief. They shun movies, jewelry, tobacco, tea, coffee, liquor. Megiddo women wear full-skirted gowns, Victorian bonnets.

Founder of the Megiddos was a bearded, astute man named L. (for nothing) T. (for nothing) Nichols, who examined many a religion in his youth, found none that he liked. In 1880 he started one for himself, and preached it through the Midwest. In 1901 he launched the steamboat Megiddo, with 95 followers plied up & down the Mississippi and Ohio making new converts. Later he sold the boat, settled his mission at Rochester, N. Y. Founder Nichols died in 1912. Present pastor of the Megiddo Mission is his sister, 83-year-old Ella Maria Skeels.

To celebrate their Christmas, Megiddos went this week to Assistant Pastor Percy J. Thatcher's drama, Pilgrims of Light. Longer than an O'Neill tragedy, it took two nights to perform in the flower-banked, frame mission hall, told the story of brothers who traveled round the world in their search for Truth. For Megiddo children, who do not believe in Santa Claus, there were quantities of useful gifts.

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