Don't look now, but it's coming soon to billboards and lawn signs near you: “Keep Christ in Christmas!” If memory serves, one first started seeing this slogan right around the time that the whole political correctness craze hit. Towns started removing manger scenes from their squares, and businesses stopped sending out Christmas cards and began to send “Holiday Greetings” instead.

Financial sights are projecting, we are moving from “a golden age” of investments and economic growth (1982-2007) to a “grey age”.  From nominal 12.8% returns to 2.8% returns.  The next ten years, we may be going through 3 more recessions.  With the baby boomers aging it may take to 2027 before returns get to golden age levels.

I can still see in my mind’s eye my mother chasing me down with her ‘koutala’ (wooden spoon) and saying in raised voice, “Didn’t you hear what I said?” In other words, since you are neither devoid of actual hearing nor incapable of mentally understanding, why are you not obeying me?

​Recently, a local museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, hosted an exhibition entitled "BODIES". This exhibit raised numerous questions and concerns about the Church's position concerning the display of the dead.

​Every good story needs a villain—even a Sunday-School Christmas pageant.  Of course, the original Christmas story from Matthew and Luke had a super-villain: King Herod.  But for a Sunday School production, it doesn't really work to have grade-school kids acting out the Slaughter of the Innocents, so there isn't room for a Herod.  In his place, therefore, a new villain must be found.  And so now the bad guy of every Christmas pageant is ... the innkeeper! That cruel, heartless, money-driven petty tyrant who couldn't find a space in his inn for a pregnant woman and her weary husband. Because of his indifference, the holy family winds up—not in a room at the Bethlehem Motel Six—but in a barn, in a stable, amidst hay and cattle … and all that stuff that turns up when cattle and hay come together.  It is a picture of consummate inhospitality toward the infant Christ.

Mothers are curious people aren’t they?  All mothers somehow, regardless of their background, learn exactly the same things to say to their children—like when they call you by your full name when you’ve done something wrong.  When a child is given anything, a cookie or a compliment, every mother in the same words and the same tone of voice asks, “Now, what do you say?”