Vocabulary > Time > Christmas

At the Pine Street Inn in Boston, Massachusetts,

Cardinal Sean O'Malley

serves a Christmas Eve luncheon to homeless men and women.

Boston Globe/John Tlumacki

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Christmas 2009
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/christmas_2009.html

Christ

Christian

Christmas        2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-victorian-christmas.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/24/christianity-religion
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/23/heathrow-airport-family-friends-reunions
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/23/spirit-christmas-dead-living
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/dec/21/christmas-movies-best-and-worst
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/21/grumpy-guide-to-christmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2011/dec/21/modern-toss-christmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/21/scrooge-christmas-dilemmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/20/christmas-survival-guide

Pope calls for an end to violence in Syria in his Christmas Day message        December 2011
Benedict XVI asks for God's help
in countries hit by war and natural disasters
in his traditional 'Urbi et Orbi' speech
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/25/pope-violence-syria-christmas-message

Pope decries commercial glitter of Christmas        December 2011
Pontiff's Christmas Eve address laments
that message of Christ's birth is obscured by a celebration of consumerism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/24/pope-christmas-eve-address-christ

Houses transformed by Christmas lights – in pictures        2011
Britons up and down the country have spent weeks adorning their houses with thousands of lights
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2011/dec/22/houses-christmas-lights-pictures

Christmas pub crawl        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/dec/23/best-place-christmas-pub-crawl

Christmas dinner        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/21/christmas-dinner-tasteless-turkey

Christmas pudding        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/21/christmas-dinner-tasteless-turkey

Christmas shoppers        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/24/christmas-shoppers-high-streets-rush

Christmas        USA        2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday/bruni-silent-night-not-with-us.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/garden/a-mistletoe-shortage-threatens-a-holiday-kissing-tradition.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/business/retailers-are-slashing-prices-ahead-of-holiday.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/nyregion/shopping-for-christmas-gifts-while-most-are-asleep.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/business/economy/stores-shuffle-a-saturday-in-hopes-of-saving-the-season.html

Christmas 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/12/christmas_across_the_globe.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/opinion/25sat2.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2010/nov/19/unique-christmas-gift-ideas-women
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2010/nov/19/unique-christmas-gift-ideas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2010/oct/27/top-toys-christmas-2010

cartoons > Cagle > Christmas foreclosures        USA        December 2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasForeclosure10/main.asp

Christmas turkey        2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/dec/20/how-cook-christmas-turkey-barbecue

Christmas turkey        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2010/dec/20/christmas-turkey

Christmas dinner        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/dec/20/how-to-cook-perfect-christmas-dinner

Christmas roast recipes        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/12/turkey-pheasant-christmas-recipes

Christmas dessert recipes        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/12/christmas-recipes-cake-fruit-baking

Christmas pudding recipes        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/12/nigel-slater-christmas-dessert-pudding-recipes

brandy butter recipe        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/12/nigel-slater-classic-brandy-butter-recipe

Kipper Williams Christmas cartoons 2010
Seven Christmas cards from the Guardian's business website,
illustrated by cartoonist Kipper Williams
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2010/dec/10/kipper-williams-christmas-cartoons-2010

The perfect Christmas hamper        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2010/nov/30/christmas-hamper-food-festive

Christmas gift guide 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2010/nov/19/unique-christmas-gift-ideas-stocking-fillers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2010/nov/19/unique-christmas-gift-ideas

Ghosts of Christmas past: festive adverts in the Guardian – in pictures        2011
With Christmas Day almost upon us,
we take a look back at Guardian adverts from Christmas past
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/gallery/2011/dec/21/christmas-past-adverts-guardian-archive

Cartoons > Cagle > Christmas        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/Christmas10/main.asp

Cartoons > Cagle > Obama Christmas        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasObama10/main.asp

Cartoons > Cagle > Christmas economy        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasEconomy10/main.asp

Cartoons > Cagle > Santa and Wikileaks        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/SantaWikiLeaks/main.asp

Cartoons > Cagle > Santa        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/Santa10/main.asp

Christmas in the classroom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/series/christmas-in-the-classroom

Christmas cards
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/12/david-mitchell-christmas-cards

leftwing Christmas cards
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/dec/02/leftwing-political-christmas-cards-exhibition

Christmas seals        USA

CHRISTMAS SEALS, first sold 104 years ago in a Delaware post office,
transformed the treatment and control of tuberculosis,
one of the most feared killers of the age.

Just as important, they produced a revolution in philanthropy.
At that time, the 1 percent of the late Gilded Age,
men with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller,
were creating major new philanthropic institutions.
Christmas Seals, in a way, was the response from the other 99 percent:
by marketing something as inexpensive as a stamp
and using the proceeds to attack a major disease,
the founders of the Christmas Seals program
demonstrated the collective power of the American public.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/christmas-seals-and-mass-philanthropy.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Christmas 2009
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/christmas_2009.html

Cagle cartoons > Christmas credit crunch        2009
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasCreditCrunch09/main.asp

The best Christmas recipes        2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2009/dec/08/best-christmas-recipes

Christmas gift guide 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2009/nov/27/christmas-gift-guide-2009

Christmas        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/25/monarchy-creditcrunch
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/3935103/
Queens-Christmas-message-to-focus-on-economic-woes.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5396815.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5391794.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/25/christmas-sermon-murphy-oconnor-williams
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/25/high-street-christmas-shopping
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5394204.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5391628.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/22/christmas-hazard-guide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/22/comment-christmas-santa-claus
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/foodanddrink+christmas
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article5373136.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/20/transport-automotive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/20/mrs-scrooge-carol-ann-duffy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2008/dec/19/christmas?picture=340931539
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2008/dec/08/credit-crunch-christmas-cards?picture=340423839
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2008/dec/01/christmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/page/2008/dec/02/rowsonxmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2008/dec/01/christmas-advent-calendar-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2008/sep/23/creditcrunch.marketturmoil?picture=340163388

The Queen's annual Christmas message        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/25/monarchy-creditcrunch

Christmas        2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2007/dec/10/kipper.williams.christmas.cards?picture=331495115
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/story/0,,2188273,00.html

Christmas    2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2006/0,,1952822,00.html

Christmas / Christmases
http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1961065,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/story/0,,1920187,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2005/0,16848,1652607,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2005/story/0,,1660885,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2004/0,15386,1344551,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1109474,00.html
http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/christmas2003/0,14045,1083318,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2003/story/0,14075,1107690,00.html

Ghosts of a Christmas Past > Macon, Ga., Dec. 24, 1860
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/ghosts-of-a-christmas-past/

Christmas shopping
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2519812,00.html

Online Christmas shopping        2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/dec/01/retail.christmas2007

Christmas books
http://books.guardian.co.uk/booksoftheyear2007/story/0,,2216113,00.html

Xmas

Happy / Merry Christmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/dec/09/cash.christmas

on Christmas Eve
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/25/marine-death-afghanistan

on Christmas Day

goose
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/dec/14/consider-the-goose

Christmas turkey        2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5371264.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article5097644.ece

Christmas TV        2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/last-rites-for-christmas-tv-1208604.html

Christmases past, present and future

over the Christmas holidays

Christmas in jail
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1376632,00.html

The Pope > Christmas Day message        2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/25/pope-china-catholics-brave-oppression

The Pope's Christmas Day appeal / "Urbi et Orbi" speech       2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-12-24-pope-mass_N.htm

celebrate the Christmas Midnight Mass        2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-12-24-pope-mass_N.htm

hold a candlelight Christmas service

attend a Mass / mass

celebrate Christmas

mark Christmas
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/25/asia/web.xmas.html

The Guardian Christmas Appeal        2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmasappeal2006/story/0,,1962341,00.html

Christmas Midnight Mass        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-12-24-pope_x.htm

The average Briton spent £2,200 on Christmas last year    [2005]
http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,,1978100,00.html

The Queen's Christmas speech        2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1959007,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1959009,00.html

Archbishop of Westminster's Midnight Mass homily        2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1959056,00.html

Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon        2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1958735,00.html

Selling Christmas during the Great Depression
Tribune ads from the era show retailers in aggressive pursuit of those spare dimes
http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-081209-depression-xmas-ads-pg,0,742816.photogallery

Christmas Day tragedy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1676757,00.html

Cartoons > President Bush's Christmas        USA        2007
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasBush07/main.asp

Advent Calendar        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2008/dec/01/christmas-advent-calendar-2008

Advent Calendar    2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1954373,00.html

at the Vatican

Gasoline Alley

by Jim Scancarelli

Gocomics

December 25, 2011
http://www.gocomics.com/gasolinealley/2011/12/25

Bethlehem
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/22/jesus-the-year-bethlehem-closed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/21/worst-christmas-ever-suzanne-moore
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1959015,00.html

the traditional birthplace of Jesus

Manger Square near the Church of the Nativity
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-12-24-bethlehem-christmas_x.htm

in the Holy Land

nativity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2007/story/0,,2227962,00.html

Cartoons > nativity        USA        2007
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasNativity07/main.asp

Film > The Nativity Story        2006
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1978224,00.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,,1976797,00.html

the infant Jesus

The Nativity Story

cartoons > Cagle > Nativity        December 2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/ChristmasNativity10/main.asp

The Epiphany of Our Lord /
Epiphany / January 6 / Three Kings' day / Twelfth Day / Twelfthtide
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/Epiphany

the star of Bethlehem

the Magi / the three kings / the three wise men / Melchior, Gaspar, & Balthasar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/21/worst-christmas-ever-suzanne-moore

the Adoration of the Magi
- the three kings bringing gifts to the Christ Child twelve days after his birth
http://www.nga.gov/collection/adoration.shtm

on January 6th, or twelfth night, the last of the 12 days of Christmas

worship

crèches / nativity scenes
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/santa-monica-nativity-scenes-replaced-by-atheists.html

manger
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/santa-monica-nativity-scenes-replaced-by-atheists.html

crib

snow

snowman
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/22/new-version-snowman-christmas-tv

Old Man Winter

Jack Frost

white Christmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/14/white-christmas-likely-arctic-weather

at Christmas

Christmas eve

Christmas Day
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1978862,00.html

Yule

Yuletide

Christmas cracker

Christmas carols
http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/dec2000.html

Charles Dickens > Christmas Carol
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1673562,00.html
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DicChri.html

Christmas music / songs
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/opinion/26fri4.html

Christmas songs lyrics
http://christmas-song-lyrics.com/

Christmas story
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2003/story/0,14075,1112148,00.html

Merry Christmas / Xmas

Boxing Day
Boxing Day, usually thought of as Dec. 26,
but technically the first weekday after Christmas
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/opinion/26flanders.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/dec/26/boxingdaysales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/story/0,,1978740,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hunt/Story/0,,1978754,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3284-1958788,00.html

turkey

Christmas list

Christmas appeal

Santa Claus / Father Christmas / St. Nicholas
http://www.cagle.com/news/Santa10/main.asp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/24/santa-tracker-norad-radar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/22/comment-christmas-santa-claus
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/santa_claus/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2006/story/0,,1977823,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/retail/story/0,,1920187,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/netnotes/article/0,6729,858160,00.html

Santa Claus outfit / suit
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/us/26Santa.html

Santa Claus performers for Christmas grottos

sleigh

reindeer        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/reindeer-are-fading-into-holiday-myth.html

Rudolf

Jeff Parker

Florida Today

Cagle

3 December 2010

Steve Breen

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Cagle

16 November 2010

Eric Allie

Chicago

Cagle

18 November 2010

Issue 1226        Price £1.50

19 December 2008
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers.php?showme=1226&

Tab (Thomas Boldt)

The Calgary Sun        Alberta, Canada

Cagle

22.12.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/tab.asp

Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) > A Visit from St. Nicholas

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On Cupid! On, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes -- how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet231.html

Related
"A Visit from St. Nicholas", also known as "The Night Before Christmas"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Visit_from_St._Nicholas 

The Guardian        G2        pp. 14-15        20.12.2006

Albion, NY - 1961 - Alfred Eisenstaedt

16: And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary,
of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

17: So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations;
and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations;
and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.

18: Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise:
When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph,
before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

19: Then Joseph her husband, being a just man,
and not willing to make her a publick example,
was minded to put her away privily.

20: But while he thought on these things,
behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream,
saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife:
for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

21: And she shall bring forth a son,
and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

22: Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled
which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying,

23: Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son,
and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

24: Then Joseph being raised from sleep
did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife:

25: And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son:
and he called his name JESUS.

Holy Bible > New Testament > Matthew, King James Version, 1611
http://wyllie.lib.virginia.edu:8086/perl/toccer-new?id=KjvMatt.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/
parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/kjv.browse.html

David Parkins

The Guardian       p. 29

27.12.2005

Related > Gaza strip barrier / border wall
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/world/middleeast/29mideast.html
 

Corky Trinidad

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin

Cagle

6.12.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/locher.asp

Dick Locher

Chicago -- The Chicago Tribune

Cagle

8.12.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/locher.asp

Richard Crowson

The Witchita Eagle, Kansas

Cagle

7.12.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/crowson.asp

The Guardian        p. 24        23.11.2005

Mark Trail        Jack Elrod        Created by Ed Dodd in 1946        12.12.2004
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/mtrail/about.htm

Godless and Penniless: A Christmas Story

How one couple navigates the holiday season with little money or religion.

New York Times        December 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/17/opinion/20081217_opart.html

Jeff Parker

Florida Today

Cagle

17.12.2008
http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/PCbest2.asp

Gerald Scarfe cartoon

The Sunday Times        December 21, 2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article5373136.ece

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as Santa Claus

Background > Recession

Rob Rogers

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania

Cagle

11 December 2010

Christmas Merry-Making, How to Enjoy it!

An advertisement.

Record number: 1416 / Shelfmark: 1850.d.2513

Hand-coloured Window-bills

designed for Rag and Bone Merchants.

Samuel Reeves: London, 1860

British Library
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Christmas images
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Christmas lights

be lit up
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Christmas tree
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present
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gift
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bauble
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candle

Christmas ornament fire alarm

wreath

gingerbread people

snowflake

nativity set

chimney
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mistletoe
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ivy

rosemary

holly
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poinsettia

present
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Christmas wrapping paper

unwrap

toy

business
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poor Christmas trading
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Christmas sales

have a poor Christmas
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Christmas > American memory / Library of Congress
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Christmas quiz
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Quentin Blake

London Library
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WW2 > UK > Christmas at war

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WW2 > USA > song > Bing Crosby > "I'll Be Home for Christmas"

"I'll be home for Christmas
You can plan on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the lovelight gleams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams

I'll be home for Christmas
You can plan on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the lovelight gleams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams"

The Pictorial World

Supplement to the Christmas Number

18 December 1878

Copyright ©2000, The British Library Board
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Benjamin Zephaniah > Talking Turkeys
(from 'Talking Turkeys')

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A Victorian Christmas

December 24, 2011
The New York Times
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

AT the end of his life, Charles Dickens did not have great expectations for Christmas.

He had separated from his wife, describing his marriage as “blighted and wasted.” His mistress was not around. He was disappointed that his sons lacked his ambition. His final Christmas, he wrote a colleague, was painful and miserable.

“The Inimitable,” as he had christened himself when he was young and celebrated, was drained from traveling to give paid readings and suffering from such severe gout that he could not write clearly or walk well. He was confined to bed all Christmas Day and through dinner, bleak in his house.

Literature’s answer to Santa Claus, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes in “Becoming Dickens,” had always gravitated to the holiday.

“Christmas was always a time which in our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight,” his daughter Mamie said.

Dickens would dance and play the conjurer. “My father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything,” recalled his son Henry.

Douglas-Fairhurst wonders if this “inventor of Christmas” might have developed his “ruthless” determination to enjoy the day because of the traumatic year he spent as a child working in a rat-infested shoe-polish warehouse in London after his father went to prison for debts. Did England’s most famous novelist need “to recreate his childhood as it should have been rather than as it was?”

The biographer notes that Dickens, in his fiction, “rarely describes a family Christmas without showing how vulnerable it is to being broken apart by a more miserable alternative. In ‘Great Expectations’ it is the soldiers who burst into Pip’s home on Christmas Day, saving him from a dinner in which the only highlight is Joe slopping extra spoonfuls of gravy onto his plate. In ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ the young hero goes missing on Christmas Eve, leaving behind several clues that he had been murdered by his uncle. Saddest of all, in ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Scrooge is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to observe his boyhood self left behind at school, and weeps ‘to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.’ ”

Douglas-Fairhurst points out that Dickens’s fiction teems with ifs, just-supposes and alternative scenarios, “what might have been and what was not.” He even wrote two different endings for “Great Expectations,” one where Estella and Pip don’t end up together and one where they seem to.

“Pause you,” Pip says, “and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

Dickens was rescued from the warehouse and sent back to school when his father got out of prison and wangled a Navy pension. But that year drove home to him how frighteningly random fate can be.

“I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond,” he once said.

His need to control his fate may have led to a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He routinely rearranged the furniture in hotel rooms, acknowledging that his “love of order” was “almost a disorder.”

Dickens — whose bicentenary will be celebrated on Feb. 7 — worked himself to death at 58, but he always feared obscurity was lurking.

In October 1843, he had the idea for “A Christmas Carol.” As Claire Tomalin writes in another new book, “Charles Dickens: A Life,” he told a friend “he had composed it in his head, weeping and laughing and weeping again” as he walked around London at night.

He had visited one of the “ragged schools,” set up in poor parts of London by volunteer teachers to educate homeless, starving and disabled pupils, and the novella, published that December, was his screed about the indifference of the rich toward those less fortunate.

Scrooge gets redeemed from an alternate life as a misanthrope, and Tiny Tim is saved from death. But two “wolfish” children, a boy named Ignorance and a girl named Want, are not rescued, but rather left to haunt readers’ consciences.

In his 1851 short story “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,” Dickens makes the case that the holiday is the time to “bear witness” to our parallel lives, our “old aspirations,” “old projects” and “old loves.”

“Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly,” he wrote.

Maybe, he suggests, you end up better off without that “priceless pearl” who does not return your love. Maybe you don’t have to suppress the memory of deceased loved ones.

“Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you!” he wrote. “You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!”

    A Victorian Christmas, NYT, 24.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-victorian-christmas.html

Where Crèches Once Stood, Atheists Now Hold Forth

December 21, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The elaborate Nativity scenes rose in a city park along the oceanfront here every December for nearly six decades. More than a dozen life-size dioramas depicted the Annunciation, Mary and Joseph being turned away at the inn and, of course, the manger.

This always angered Damon Vix, who worked off and on in Santa Monica and considers himself a devout atheist, so to speak. How could it be, he asked himself each year, that the city could condone such an overtly religious message?

So, a few years ago, he petitioned the city and received his own space, using it to put up a sign offering “Reason’s Greetings.” But this year, he wanted more. Mr. Vix gathered a few supporters and applied for dozens of spaces in Palisades Park, a patch of green on a bluff overlooking the sandy beaches that this city is famous for.

Suddenly, city officials realized they had far more requests for space than they could fulfill, they said, and created a lottery. When it was finished, the atheists had received a vast majority of the spaces. The Christian groups were forced to choose three scenes from their typical 14.

Now, the city is embroiled in a seasonal controversy it has somehow avoided for decades.

“We’re trying to balance something that has been a real tradition here and also live within federal law,” said Barbara Stinchfield, the director of community services for the city. “We were trying to accommodate all the groups that were interested in the most fair way we could.”

Ms. Stinchfield has been somewhat surprised at the intensity of the debate — which has been a hot topic for days in local newspapers and on radio shows and blogs.

“People keep asking why we do what we do,” she said, sounding a bit weary. “It’s really a simple answer: the law regulates a park as a traditional public forum, and we’re trying to do that.”

Hunter Jameson, the president of the group that organizes the Nativity scenes, said he did not believe the city had done anything wrong. The most “extremely irksome” issue, he said, is that Mr. Vix and the other atheists seem most focused on pushing out the Christian scenes. Much of the space the atheists secured is sitting unused, and for the most part small white signs bearing secular quotations have replaced the Nativity scenes.

Under the city’s rules, any group was allowed to apply for as many as 14 spaces. Because Mr. Vix had seven people applying for the maximum amount, they were more likely to get the spaces in the lottery.

“Rather than use it to put forth a message of their own, they’ve really shown that their goal is just an effort to take something away rather than give anything to the community,” Mr. Jameson said. “They’re trying to censor something that the community has clearly shown it appreciates.”

Adding to his unhappiness, he said, is that none of the atheist applicants live in Santa Monica. (Mr. Jameson himself lives a few miles away, but attends church in the city.)

“The idea that religious speech is less protected than other free speech is an attack on the First Amendment, and the attempt of these people to block us is a real attack on our rights,” Mr. Jameson said. “This is just our way of saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”

Mr. Vix said he had encouraged the atheists to leave some of the spaces blank. If they put up as many messages as the Christians had, he said, there would be a backlash, and he predicted that the city would cancel the December tradition altogether. He also said the atheists had been trying only to receive the same amount of space that the churches had for years.

Mr. Vix said that from the time he first saw the displays in the early 1990s, he considered them a “blatant government support of religion.”

“I strongly believe in government and have my whole life,” he said, “and our founding fathers created the separation of church and state. If we don’t exercise our rights, we lose them. So I really felt the need to highlight the inherent problem.”

The Nativity scenes are not the only signs of religion this time of year. Rabbi Eli Levitansky, who helps to run the Chabad Jewish outreach programs in the area, said Santa Monica might have the “highest concentration of public menorahs” of any city in the country. (To keep score: there are 60 such menorahs scattered across the city’s 8.3 miles.)

Rabbi Levitansky, who grew up in Santa Monica, does not see a problem with the Nativity scenes and said that most people he knew — religious and not — were upset about the changes this year. “To come in and create chaos for no reason whatsoever, other than to just take away from the joy of the holidays for other people, is shallow and an improper thing to do,” he said.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said the Santa Monica situation was “one of the cutest success stories of the season.” This year, the Wisconsin-based group has put up its own version of a manger in the Wisconsin State Capitol, with Einstein, Darwin and Emma Goldman standing as the wise men and a black female doll as the featured infant.

The displays in Santa Monica are not nearly as elaborate. One of Mr. Vix’s favorite signs sits right in the middle of the park, but few passers-by stopped one recent afternoon to read the quote from Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century writer and orator:

“Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

    Where Crèches Once Stood, Atheists Now Hold Forth, NYT, 21.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/santa-monica-nativity-scenes-replaced-by-atheists.html

Past, Present and Yet to Come

December 24, 2010
The New York Times

What are your Christmases made of? A tree full of ornaments as old as you are? A customary feast, if not of roast beast? Perhaps they’re composed of wassail and yule, nog and Nöel, Scrooge, “Scrooged,” Pickwick and Charlie Brown. Or Handel and Berlioz, Garland, Cole, Crosby and Clooney, the Rockettes and the dance of a Sugar Plum Fairy, even Bedford Falls and “The Bishop’s Wife.” To Christians everywhere, Christmas comprises, above all, a decree from Caesar Augustus and in the same country shepherds abiding.

Running through all these Christmases is the sense of an emotional cadenza at the end of the year, a braiding of feelings like hope, renewal, nostalgia, love, joy and exhaustion. Yet in the stories about this holiday, it’s surprising how often we’re reminded of a darker life, full of isolation, penury, greed, despair and the fear that traps emotion within us.

This day may come to you as part of the yearlong liturgical calendar, or it may be a wholly secular day, the climax of a secular season. It may mean imbibing or baking for weeks or simply a late breakfast after all the presents have been opened. Perhaps for you the real Christmas comes on the eve before it, candle in hand. There are those for whom this day means mainly passing out of — at last — the asteroid belt of holiday songs we enter every Thanksgiving.

What does it mean to keep Christmas well, as Dickens puts it? Not the ecstasy of Scrooge, not even the festal exuberance of the Fezziwig Christmas Ball. All the good stories about Christmas — from Matthew and Luke or from Dr. Seuss — remind us that Christmas can be kept “anyhow and everyhow” (Dickens again) as long as there is charity and humility in the celebration of it. Charity, humility, good will and a prayer for peace.

    Past, Present and Yet to Come, NYT, 24.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/opinion/25sat2.html

In Season of Recession, New Ways to Celebrate

December 26, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA and KEN BELSON

No lamb this year; ham, at 89 cents a pound, was a better deal. There were gifts, yes, but fewer than usual, and only for the children. Maybe clothes this time around instead of a bag of toys. Somehow, the Long Island chill would have to be made as alluring a holiday destination as the isles of the Caribbean.

It is unsurprising, perhaps, that this is the Christmas of cutbacks, what with neighbors facing foreclosures, relatives being laid off and the endless chatter of a recession like no other. Nearly everyone in New York City, it seemed — from shoppers in central Brooklyn to churchgoers in the Bronx, people eating (and volunteering) at a Harlem soup kitchen and those heading out of town from Penn Station — had something they were doing without.

“It doesn’t feel like Christmas,” said Christine Enniss, who planned to pare her holiday spread to the essentials: green salad, roast chicken and, maybe, potato salad.

But as each family tried to make merry amid the misery, what stayed and went was revealing. Sharon Parker, whose husband recently lost his job as a mechanic, held Christmas dinner for her immediate family of five, rather than playing host to the more than a dozen cousins and friends she usually has over. Susan Strande, an art teacher who lives in the East Village, did her own baking rather than buying fancy tarts and pies. O’Neil Hutchinson, an engineering consultant, visited family in England several weeks ago to avoid the more expensive holiday fares.

Many tried to avoid sacrificing quantity by scaling back on quality. At Sherry-Lehmann Wine and Spirits on Park Avenue near 59th Street, sales of Nicolas Feuillatte Brut Champagne, at $27.95 a bottle, more than doubled, to 160 cases this month, from last December. But “all the higher-end stuff is more likely to stay on the shelves,” said Chris Adams, a partner in the store.

Mr. Adams, for his part, went to Saks Fifth Avenue on Christmas Eve to shop for a last-minute gift for his wife, as he always does. But he stayed away from the pricey perfumes, veering instead to the makeup counter to buy creams she might need and would normally pick up for herself.

Of course, this cutback Christmas can also be seen as the season of the sales. Some took advantage of bargain trips to Las Vegas resorts; others filled shopping bags with merchandise at half price. “Everything was really cheap,” said one woman, a bit defensively, as she boarded a train to see family in New Jersey, laden with Bloomingdale’s bags that were teeming with red-wrapped gifts.

For the Lombardo family, Christmas Eve has always been about the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a traditional Italian banquet.

But with business at the family’s pizzeria in Harrison, N.Y., pinched, the Lombardos scaled back. Each of the 18 adults and seven grandchildren was served the seven courses, but the grownups survived on one lobster tail instead of two. The crowd shared a few dozen clams on the half shell instead of 10 dozen or more, the shrimp cocktails were more modest, the linguini had fewer blue crabs, and there was a bit less scungilli. There were fewer Alaskan king crab legs, too.

“We’re not getting a lot of businessmen taking their clients to lunch,” Sofia Lombardo, a daughter of one of the founders, said of her family’s restaurant, Sofia’s Pizzeria. “They just have slices instead of chicken parmesan.”

The tug of tough times also led the Lombardos to trim their gift-giving. Last year, the adults traded “secret Santa” gifts worth about $75 each. This year, they decided to limit each gift to $30.

Ms. Lombardo’s parents and one of her brothers did away with swapping gifts entirely. “My family always went to the nines,” she said. “Is it weird not opening gifts on Christmas Day? Yes. But the catering business is not where it’s been in the last few years.”

Even with less, there were countless attempts to make Christmas as happy as it has always been. Parents, in particular, took pains to give their children an abundance of gifts, even while watching the price tag.

Last year, Veronica Tyms bought 30 presents for cousins, in-laws, friends and their children. This year, she chopped her list in half and fully expected the would-be recipients to do the same. “We didn’t have to talk about it,” said Ms. Tyms’s friend Margaret Gregory, who joined her this week on a bargain-hunting trip to the Target store in the Atlantic Terminal Mall in Brooklyn. “People just understood.”

Both women, however, still showered their children with presents. Ms. Gregory ticked off the list for her 18-year-old daughter: “clothes, movies, perfume, makeup.” Ms. Tyms bought gifts for her 8-year-old son and more than a dozen other children of friends and relatives.

“My son still believes in Santa Claus,” she said. “I’m not ready to change that yet.”

Ed Chin of Greenwich, Conn., who landed at job at China Merchants Bank in September after being out of work for six months, skipped the usual trip to North Carolina to visit his in-laws and to golf, and he canceled his family’s traditional Champagne brunch. Rather than expensive gifts for each of their four children, ages 9 to 14, Mr. Chin and his wife, Julie, bought an Xbox video game console for them to share.

“Even people in Greenwich have to tighten up,” Ms. Chin said of her wealthy hometown. “This is not the time to spend money on this kind of stuff.”

Dominic Giangrasso, who runs the computer systems at ConEdison Solutions, hooked up a Web camera to his flat-panel television so that his pregnant daughter, who lives in Massachusetts, could watch Christmas dinner at his home in Westchester County rather than spend money on traveling there.

The Rev. Jos Kandathikudy, the priest at St. Thomas Syro Malabar Catholic Church in the Bronx, said that last year he walked from the rectory through the neighborhood to admire the fanciful decorations. This year, he said, the streets were mostly dark.

“Businesses and residences both; I think people just want to and need to save money — everything is reduced,” he said. “But this is not the meaning of Christmas. It is not about lights and presents.”

Father Kandathikudy was one of many ministers to preach about how the tough economic times could help people focus on the religious meaning of Christmas.

One parishioner at the Church of the Ascension on West 107th Street simply handed over $500 to the Rev. John Duffell last week, saying only that someone needed it more than he did.

And at the Church of Saint Raymond on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx, one altar girl had trimmed her wish list.

“My daughter understood that things were difficult this year,” said Maria Gonzalez, 40, as she walked into the noon Mass at the church, beaming as her daughter, Jessica Garcia, led the processional. “She loves music and has worked so hard to practice, so all she wanted was a keyboard. She wants to play music to serve God, and I want to help her in that.”
 

Ralph Blumenthal and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting.

    In Season of Recession, New Ways to Celebrate, NYT, 26.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/nyregion/26xmas.html?hp

Man in a Santa Suit Kills at Least 8 at a Party

December 26, 2008
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

COVINA, Calif. — A man in a Santa Claus outfit opened fire on a Christmas Eve gathering of his in-laws in this Los Angeles suburb and then methodically set their house ablaze, killing at least eight people and injuring several others, the authorities said Thursday.

Shortly after the attack, the gunman, identified as Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, killed himself with a single shot to the head at the home of his brother in the Sylmar section of Los Angeles, the police said.

In addition to the eight people whose bodies were found in the ashes of the house here, none of whom were identified, at least one other person was thought to be missing, and perhaps as many as three. Among the total of dead or missing were the couple who owned the home and their daughter, the estranged wife of the gunman, the police said.

Investigators continued to search the charred structure Thursday, and coroners said dental records would be needed to identify some of the remains.

The frenzied shooting occurred just before midnight Wednesday at the two-story house, set on a cul-de-sac in this middle-class town about 22 miles east of Los Angeles. Lt. Pat Buchanan of the Covina Police Department said Mr. Pardo, armed with one or two handguns and fire accelerant, had gone to the house looking for his former wife, Sylvia, with whom he was finalizing a contentious divorce after only a year of marriage.

People who escaped the house got out by smashing through glass and jumping. One woman broke an ankle when she leapt from a second-floor window.

The house was owned by James and Alicia Ortega, an elderly couple who were retired from their spray-painting business and who often invited their large extended family over for parties, particularly around Christmas.

Relatives said about 25 people, among them many children, were inside the home celebrating when Mr. Pardo knocked on the door around 11:30 p.m. He had apparently disguised himself as a hired entertainer for the children in order to gain access.

When a guest opened the door, Lieutenant Buchanan said, Mr. Pardo stepped inside the house, drew a semiautomatic handgun and immediately started shooting, beginning with an 8-year-old girl who was hit in the face but who survived, as did an older girl who was shot in the back.

As Mr. Pardo unleashed a barrage of gunfire in the living room, relatives smashed through windows, hid behind furniture or bounded upstairs. Then he sprayed the room with accelerant, using a device made of two pressurized tanks, one of which held pressurized gas. Within seconds, the house was ablaze.

Joshua Chavez of Seattle was visiting his mother’s house, which sits behind the Ortegas’, when he heard a loud explosion. “Then I saw black smoke and this large flame,” he said.

Mr. Chavez ran out to the backyard and heard three girls, including the one who had been shot in the back, trying to climb over his mother’s wall. “There’s some guy shooting in there,” he said one of the girls told him.

“About 20 seconds after that,” he continued, “the house was totally on fire. One girl said that a guy dressed as Santa started shooting.”

Another neighbor, Jeannie Goltz, 51, saw three more partygoers fleeing the burning home. One of them, a young woman, had escaped upstairs from the living room but broke her ankle when she jumped out a second-story window.

SWAT teams arrived shortly after Ms. Goltz had shepherded these three survivors into another neighbor’s house, but by that time Mr. Pardo was on his way back to Los Angeles.

Police officers said they could not recall so horrific a crime in Covina, and neighbors said they would never have imagined anything so grisly on their quiet block.

The Ortegas had lived in the house for more than two decades and were known for their family spirit, their generosity and their dog, which frequently escaped their yard.

“I would generally play Santa for the family every year,” said Pat Bower, a neighbor of the Ortegas for 25 years. “The family was always together. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles were always in the house. They were a gigantic family. We all envied them, actually.”

Robert and Gloria Magcalas lived next door to the Ortegas for 11 years but were celebrating Christmas Eve with relatives in Los Angeles. Their own home was barely spared the flames.

“They were a big, loving family,” Mrs. Magcalas said. “We usually exchanged gifts with them today. They gave us tamales and cookies every Christmas.”

The police said they had found two handguns in the ruins, and an additional two pistols at the scene of Mr. Pardo’s apparent suicide. Officials said they would continue to search the crime scene Friday, seeking information about the identities of the dead.

Solomon Moore reported from Covina, and Anahad O’Connor from New York.

    Man in a Santa Suit Kills at Least 8 at a Party, NYT, 26.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/us/26Santa.html?hp

A Christmas miracle:

woman found alive after three days buried in a snowdrift

• Rescue dog picks up scent and gloveless hand in field
• Blanket of insulating snow kept her alive in -15C cold

Wednesday 24 December 2008
The Guardian
Ed Pilkington in New York
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.01 GMT on Wednesday 24 December 2008.
It appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday 24 December 2008 on p3 of the Top stories section.
It was last updated at 00.01 GMT on Wednesday 24 December 2008.

For Donna Molnar and her family in Ancaster, Canada, Christmas is a time of joy compromised by tragedy. Eight years ago, her father-in-law died on December 22 and two years after that her mother died on Christmas Day.

So when Molnar went missing last Friday, there was a terrible foreboding of history repeating itself. She had left the house in the afternoon at the start of a big snowstorm, and was presumed to have gone shopping for supplies for the cake-baking she was doing.

As darkness fell on Friday night her husband called the police, and a rescue mission was launched. Over the weekend up to 20 officers, aided by numerous volunteers, combed the surrounding land, discovering her van buried in the snowdrift, but nothing else.

And then on Monday afternoon, almost three full days after Molnar went missing, something extraordinary happened. One of the volunteer search and rescue team, Ray Lau, was in a field near a farmers' market on the edge of Ancaster, a small town about 45 miles west of Toronto.

He noticed his dog, Ace, a four-year-old dutch shepherd, was excited by a scent he had apparently picked up.

By then hope among the searchers was close to rock bottom. In such harsh snowbound conditions - with temperatures falling to -15C (5F) - it is very rare for anyone to be found alive.

Molnar was dressed in ordinary clothes and only a winter jacket. The chances of her rescue diminished as the scent of the missing person was also likely to be blocked by layers of snow and dispersed by strong, swirling winds.

Ace ran off into a snow-covered field and was nuzzling something hidden there, barking furiously. Lau followed on his tail, and saw a gloveless hand and a woman's face half-obscured by a black hood.

He braced himself for a gruesome discovery. But the body began to move, and the face began to mumble something unintelligible. Donna Molnar was alive.

The officer leading the search, Mark Cox, said he had never seen anyone survive so long in such extremes. "Never even come close to something that was this unlikely. It really is incredible how she survived it. I'm shocked," he told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Since her remarkable rescue, police have been trying to piece together what happened to Molnar, a secretary at a school in Hamilton, in an attempt to understand how she survived. She had been feeling depressed before she disappeared and was on a new medication that her relatives said had caused some side effects.

When she left the house to go shopping, her husband, who was caring for her, was in the basement for just a few minutes. When he came back up she had gone, and he immediately went looking for her, noticing her van had gone too.

Police are not sure whether she made it to the shops, but they think she must have wandered into a field and, disorientated by the blizzard, lay down just as the storm was starting. She had become almost entirely covered in snow, with just her hand and face showing.

It was that layering of snow, police believe, that acted as insulation and saved her life. "She's testament to the fact that it's possible," Cox said.

The other factor without which she would almost certainly not now be alive was the nasal dexterity of Ace, whose owner called him a "four-legged star".

Molnar is now in hospital being treated for hypothermia and frostbite. Though she may lose the tips of some fingers or toes, she is expected to recover fully.

Soon after she was found, she told her rescuers she didn't intend to cause them any trouble. "I've been out here a long time, haven't I?" she said.

    A Christmas miracle: woman found alive after three days buried in a snowdrift, G, 24.12.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/24/canada-missing-woman-found

Nature Notes: birdsong at Christmas

December 24, 2008
From The Times
Derwent May

Children getting up in the dark on Christmas morning to look at their presents may find themselves accompanied by a song thrush or a robin singing. Both these birds are now singing well before dawn, and their songs sound very loud in the silence. The robins occupy their small territories all through the winter and sing to proclaim their ownership. Sometimes they can be seen chasing off an intruding robin even on a snowy day. The song thrushes are just laying down an early claim to a territory in which they will nest in in the spring. Peacock butterflies have sometimes been seen flying about on a sunny Christmas afternoon. There are many of them hibernating in dark garages and sheds where they are almost impossible to see when their wings, with their shadowy undersides, are closed. But if they are disturbed they may wave their wings and flash the eyespots on them to frighten marauding birds, and if it is warm they may wake up and come out.

    Nature Notes: birdsong at Christmas, Ts, 24.12.2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article5388945.ece

Editorial

When Christmas Morning Comes

December 25, 2007
The New York Times

This is a simple holiday. Ask any child, or, better yet, ask yourself what you recall from your own childhood Christmases. Presents, yes, and shopping and decorations and the return of familiar songs and the smells of baking and perhaps the cadence of a few verses from the early chapters of Matthew and Luke.

What persists above all is the feeling of finally going to bed on a dark winter’s night full of hope for what the morning will bring. Even jaded adults can remember how that felt, and they remember it as viscerally as they remember anything.

The emotional truth in that transition lies at the heart of Christmas. It captures the most basic rhythm of our lives — going to bed at night and getting up in the morning — and makes us keenly, happily aware of it. That rhythm is all the more stirring because the season is so penetrating, the winter darkness so long.

Both of the basic stories we tell about Christmas, the shepherds in their fields by night and the peregrinations of Santa Claus, fill the darkness with life and possibility. A stranger, an extragalactic visitor wise enough to look past all the shopping, might be forgiven for thinking that this is the festival in which we celebrate the magic of sleep.

After all, what other holiday do we attend in robes and pajamas?

The optimism, the generosity, the charitable warmth of Christmas do stem, of course, from the pattern and the meaning of the biblical story. They have their source, too, in the sense of regeneration now that we’ve turned this darkest corner of the solar year.

Christmas is imbued with a more everyday hope as well, a recognition that the transition from sleep to waking always carries with it the immeasurable gift of a new day. The very premise is hopeful.

No one expects to wake every day as joyfully as a child at Christmas, or to sleep as badly the night before. The gift of possibility is there every morning.

    When Christmas Morning Comes, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/opinion/25tue1.html

A Work of Fiction

The Box

December 25, 2007
The New York Times
By RODDY DOYLE

HE couldn't move — he couldn't turn. He was awake but his feet were stuck. Something at the end of the bed was holding down the duvet, making it heavy.

He pulled his feet from under the weight. It was O.K. — it was fine.

He sat up and leaned across to the reading light. He turned it on.

A package, a box — at the end of the bed. A present, wrapped. He looked at his watch. It as 20 past 6.

He lived alone.

He looked again — he hadn't stopped looking. It was a big box, for some reason old-fashioned.

He slid out of the bed and got to the bedroom door. He stopped. He looked again — it was still there.

He lived alone.

There was only one door into the flat. He checked it now — it was locked. There were four windows. He checked them, too — all locked. The last was in the bedroom. The box was still on the bed. The wrapping paper — big snowflakes, red background.

He checked the door again — still locked.

There was someone in the flat.

He'd come home late the night before. Alone.

He'd made a cup of tea. He'd watched telly; 20 minutes, no more. He'd gone to bed. He'd read for a while. There'd been nothing at the end of the bed. He'd turned off the reading light. He'd stretched down in the bed. There'd been nothing there pushing against his feet. He'd slept.

There'd been someone in the flat, waiting.

He didn't believe that.

There was someone still there, hiding — he didn't believe it. There was nowhere to hide. He'd been into all the rooms. Bedroom, kitchen, toilet, sitting room. That was the lot. There was no attic. He didn't have a proper wardrobe. There was no place in the flat that someone could squash into and wait.

But he checked the windows again. He checked the door. He unlocked it and looked out at the landing. It was dark and empty. He shut the door and locked it. He went back to the bed and the box.

It was definitely a present.

He hadn't bought any presents. He'd be going to his sister's house later in the day. But he'd bought nothing for his niece and nephews. They were teenagers; he didn't really know them. He'd give them money, for their cider and chemicals. He hadn't bought anything for his sister. He hadn't brought the box into the flat.

He hadn't touched it yet.

He wasn't going to.

But he'd have to. He couldn't leave it there. He couldn't call the police. Hello? Hello? There's a present at the end of my bed.

How had it got there?

He looked behind him. He was being stupid. There was no one else in the flat.

He went to the kitchen. He filled the kettle and turned it on. He went back to the bedroom. The box hadn't moved. That was good — that was probably good. If it had been gone — that wouldn't have been good. He was stuck with the thing. He'd have to open it.

He sat on the side of the bed. The box shifted. He stood up. He sat again. He looked at it.

He looked behind him again.

There was a chimney, in the sitting room — he'd forgotten about the chimney. He hadn't looked.

And he wasn't going to.

He looked at the box. Then he did it — he picked it up. It wasn't heavy. And it was definitely a box, under the wrapping paper. Something inside it rattled. He put it back on the bed. He grabbed at the paper, and ripped it.

A robot.

He threw the wrapping paper onto the floor.

It was a robot, or something.

Who would want to give him a robot?

It was Lego, he saw now. He went across to the door and turned on the light. He went back to the box. "Lego Mindstorms." It wasn't just a box of Lego.

He couldn't remember ever liking Lego.

"Create thousands of robotic inventions!"

When he was a kid. He couldn't remember making anything with Lego.

He was 37.

This wasn't just Lego. It was a much bigger deal. "Program robot actions on your computer."

Was it Mac-compatible?

He sat up.

Where had the stupid thing come from?

It was Mac-compatible. It said so on the box.

He stood up. He sat down. He picked up the torn wrapping paper. He examined it carefully, held it up to the light. He was looking for a message, maybe one of those little greeting cards. But there was nothing. He let the paper drop.

The door had been locked when he'd come home. He remembered the key in his hand, and pushing the door open. He'd turned on the hall light. He'd gone straight to the kitchen. He'd filled the kettle.

There'd been nothing unusual.

He picked up the box. "Batteries not included." That was just typical. Where was he going to get batteries?

He got a train set, once. He remembered lying on the floor, on his stomach, so he could watch the engine coming toward him, and the real smoke coming from the chimney.

He sat up. He got off the bed.

He sat down again.

He opened the box — or, he didn't. He thought he was lifting the lid, but he wasn't. It was some kind of flap. With a list of the contents on its inside — a checklist — and pictures of each item. It looked great.

He stood up.

This was ridiculous — he was being sucked into something. He was 37. He didn't give a toss about robots or Lego. He looked around the room. He went out to the hall. He looked left and right. He went to the kitchen door. He stood there for a while.

He went back to the bedroom. He leaned over the box. He looked again at the contents list. "See your robot come alive!" He put his hands on the box — he had to sit down.

He knew no one who'd do this. And it looked quite expensive. It was months since there'd been anyone else in the flat.

He lifted the cardboard lid. It looked great — all the parts in plastic bags. And the "quick start guide." He'd left his laptop in the kitchen.

No.

No way. It wasn't his — he didn't want it.

He stood up.

The door had been locked. And all the windows.

There was no way in.

The chimney.

No.

The chimney.

He went into the sitting room. He turned on the light. He never used the fire. There was a plant in a pot, in the hearth. It looked dead, but it was hard to tell. It had looked like that when his sister had brought it, when he'd moved in. He didn't know the name of it. She'd told him, but he couldn't remember.

He got down on his knees. He lifted the pot and placed it to the side.

It was ridiculous.

He looked at the dust, on the tiles in front of the hearth. There was a mark there that could have been made by a boot.

Ridiculous.

He bent down and shuffled forward, till his head was right under the flue. He lay on his side, so he could look up. He heard sea gulls, from outside. He could feel dust, grit at his eyes and mouth. He thought he heard scrabbling.

He looked.

Roddy Doyle is the author of “The Commitments,” “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” and the forthcoming story collection “The Deportees.”

    The Box, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/opinion/25doyle.html

Bush Celebrates Christmas at Camp David

December 25, 2007
Filed at 9:01 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush brought his extended family together for a Christmas celebration at the chief executive's retreat at Camp David, Md., with gift exchanges and a traditional midday feast on the holiday agenda.

Gathered at the wooded compound in the Catoctin Mountains, located about 60 miles northwest of Washington, were the first couple's twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna; Mrs. Bush's mother, Jenna Welch; the president's sister, Doro Bush Koch, and her family; and the president's brother, Marvin, and his family.

The Christmas Day lunch menu called for roast turkey, cornbread dressing, green beans, sweet potato casserole, fruit salad, pumpkin and pecan pies and red velvet cake.

Bush planned to leave Camp David on Wednesday for his Texas ranch and was expected to return to Washington on New Year's Day.

On Jan. 8, the president is scheduled to begin a trip to the Middle East with stops in Israel, the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

    Bush Celebrates Christmas at Camp David, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Mass Held at Ground Zero One Last Time

December 25, 2007
Filed at 8:31 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The first midnight Mass at ground zero was celebrated as workers were still clearing debris from the World Trade Center and recovering bodies after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The last was held Monday night, giving police, firefighters, recovery workers and victims' families a final chance to pray on Christmas Eve at the site, where intensifying construction is increasingly taking up open space.

''A lot of us felt sad this was the last official midnight Mass on-site, but at the same time, there was a sense of relief. This brought closure for us,'' the Rev. Brian Jordan said early Tuesday after the service ended. A chaplain who spent 10 months at ground zero after Sept. 11, he has since presided over every midnight Mass there.

About 75 people attended the Mass, he said. One police officer was there for the first time; he had recently returned from military service in Afghanistan and before that Iraq, Jordan said. A sanitation worker who was involved in the ground zero cleanup and has sung at each year's service rendered ''God Bless America'' and ''O Holy Night.''

At one point in the prayers, those gathered were asked to say the names of loved ones who died in the 2001 attacks. As many as 150 names were mentioned, said Jordan, who carried a chalice dedicated to the memory of the Rev. Mychal Judge, a fire chaplain killed while performing last rites on other victims' bodies outside the trade center.

''It was poignant, it was moving, it was uplifting,'' Jordan said.

More than 150 people attended the first Mass in 2001, while thousands of workers were still removing the debris from the fallen twin towers and searching for bodies. Over the years, the service became a spiritual salve for those who participated.

''I see the healing that it does,'' construction worker Frank Silecchia said. ''It's like a pilgrimage.''

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, has moved the service at times from one part of the property to another, depending on construction. Officials hope to open five office towers, a transit hub and a Sept. 11 memorial there within the next five years.

Jordan said he decided to make this service the last after Port Authority officials told him that heavier construction would make it impossible to continue the tradition in 2008. Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman disputed that claim, saying Monday a spot would be found if Jordan wanted to hold future services at the site.

Jordan said it was fitting for this year's Mass to be the final one, noting that the most recent Sept. 11 commemoration may have marked the last time victims' families were allowed to descend into the pit at ground zero to remember their relatives.

''This was a holy night on sacred ground,'' he said. ''As I told the people at the site, it's been an honor and a privilege to be able to say Mass here.''

------

Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

    Mass Held at Ground Zero One Last Time, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Attacks-Last-Mass.html

Pope Speaks of Solace for ‘Tortured Regions’

December 25, 2007
Filed at 7:13 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI issued a Christmas Day appeal Tuesday to political leaders around the globe to find the ''wisdom and courage'' to end bloody conflicts in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo.

Benedict delivered his traditional ''Urbi et Orbi'' speech -- Latin for ''to the city and to the world'' -- from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, blessing thousands of people gathered in the square below under a brilliant winter sun.

Wearing gold-embroidered vestments and a bejeweled bishops' hat, or miter, Benedict urged the crowd to rejoice over the celebration of Jesus Christ's birth, which he said he hoped would bring consolation to all people ''who live in the darkness of poverty, injustice and war.''

He mentioned in particular those living in the ''tortured regions'' of Darfur, Somalia, northern Congo, the Eritrea-Ethiopia border, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Balkans.

''May the child Jesus bring relief to those who are suffering and may he bestow upon political leaders the wisdom and courage to seek and find humane, just and lasting solutions,'' he said.

Beyond those conflicts, Benedict said he was turning his thoughts this Christmas to victims of other injustices, citing women, children and the elderly, as well as refugees and victims of environmental disasters and religious and ethnic tensions.

He said he hoped Christmas would bring consolation to ''those who are still denied their legitimate aspirations for a more secure existence, for health, education, stable employment, for fuller participation in civil and political responsibilities, free from oppression and protected from conditions that offend human dignity.''

Such injustices and discrimination are destroying the internal fabric of many countries and souring international relations, he said.

In a nod to his engagement with environmental concerns, the pontiff also noted that the number of migrants and displaced people was increasing around the globe because of ''frequent natural disasters, often caused by environmental upheavals.''

The pontiff delivered his message just hours after celebrating Midnight Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

Benedict followed his speech with his traditional Christmas Day greetings -- this year delivered in 63 different languages, including Mongolian, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, Burmese, and in a new entry for 2007, Guarani, a South American Indian language.

As he finished, the bells of St. Peter's tolled and the Vatican's brightly outfitted Swiss Guards stood at attention as a band played and a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands waved national flags and cheered.

    Pope Speaks of Solace for ‘Tortured Regions’, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Vatican-Christmas.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Nightmare Before Christmas

December 22, 2007
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

Forget the turbulence in the financial markets and the subprime debacle. Forget the dark clouds of a possible recession. Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

But there’s a reason to temper the celebration, if only out of respect for an old friend who’s not doing too well. Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life-support.

I had a conversation the other day with Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. He mentioned a poll of working families that had shown that their belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.

The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners for the Change to Win labor federation, found that only 16 percent of respondents believed that their children’s generation would be better off financially than their own. While some respondents believed that the next generation would fare roughly the same as this one, nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today’s children would be “worse off” when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.

That absence of optimism is positively un-American.

“These are parents who cannot see where the jobs of the future are that will allow their kids to have a better life than they had,” said Mr. Stern. “And they’re not wrong. That’s the problem.”

Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.

The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

A study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that “for most Americans, seeing that one’s children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American dream.” But for the past 40 years, men in their 30s, prime family-raising age, have found it difficult to outdistance their dads economically.

As the Pew study put it: “Earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.” Family incomes have improved during that time largely because of the wholesale entrance of women into the work force.

For the very wealthy, of course, it’s been a different story. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005.

What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads — for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment — that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.

According to Demos, a policy research group in New York, “American families are using credit cards to bridge the gaps created by stagnant wages and higher costs of living.” Americans owe nearly $900 billion on their credit cards.

We’re running out of smoke and mirrors. The fundamental problem, the problem that is destroying the dream, is the extreme inequality pounded into the system by the corporate crowd and its handmaidens in government.

As Mr. Stern said: “To me, the issue in America is not a question of wealth or growth, it’s a question of distribution.”

When such an overwhelming portion of the economic benefits are skewed toward a tiny portion of the population — as has happened in the U.S. over the past few decades — it’s impossible for the society as a whole not to suffer.

Americans work extremely hard and are amazingly productive. But without the clout of a strong union movement, and arrayed against the mighty power of the corporations and the federal government, they don’t receive even a reasonably fair share of the economic benefits from their hard work or productivity.

Instead of celebrating bonuses this Christmas season, too many American workers are looking with dread toward 2008, worried about their rising levels of debt, or whether they will be able to hang on to a job with few or no benefits or how to tell their kids that they won’t be able to help with the cost of college.

It’s not the stuff of which dreams are made.
 

Gail Collins is off today.

    Nightmare Before Christmas, NYT, 22.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/opinion/22herbert.html?ref=opinion

UK cinemagoers flock to 'anti-Christmas' Compass

Thursday December 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

Despite being labelled "the most anti-Christmas film possible" by the Vatican, The Golden Compass consolidated its hold at the top of the UK box office this week. The big budget adaptation of the Philip Pullman fantasy saga earned £12m to comfortably hold off the challenge of new arrivals Enchanted and Bee Movie, which entered the chart in second and third place respectively.

Fred Claus fell two spots to fourth position, while the toyshop spectacular Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium was another new entry at five.

The Golden Compass has generally received lukewarm reviews from the critics, although few were as stinging as an editorial in this week's issue of the official Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, which looks unlikely to be one that the makers will be putting on the poster. It condemned the film as "un-Christian" and "the most anti-Christmas film possible" and added that it was "devoid of any particular emotion apart from a great chill".

The editorial took particular issue with Pullman's vision. "In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events," it said.

    UK cinemagoers flock to 'anti-Christmas' Compass, G, 20.12.2007, http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2230142,00.html

Missing in a Snowy Forest for Days, a Family Is Safe

December 20, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — A man and his three children who disappeared in the snowy woods last weekend were found shivering, but alive, by rescuers on Wednesday, in a three-day saga that began with a hunt for a Christmas tree and ended with what rescuers called a Christmas miracle.

The man, Frederick Dominguez, and his three children, Christopher, 18, Alexis, 15, and Joshua, 12, disappeared Sunday in a heavy forested area near Paradise, Calif., 150 miles north of San Francisco. The family had driven their pickup truck into the forest to hunt for a tree, said the authorities, who found their vehicle on a remote rural road late Monday, after the children’s mother reported them missing.

Since then, rescuers had battled bad weather — including a foot of snow and chest-high drifts — and poor visibility in their search. But about midday Wednesday, a helicopter crew from the California Highway Patrol spotted the family in a canyon west of their vehicle, even as another storm approached.

“They had a minimal break in the weather, and they were doing their sweeps,” said Madde Watts, a member of a search and rescue team with the Butte County Sheriff’s Department. “And on their last sweep, they saw the family jumping up and down.”

Ms. Watts said the family appeared to be in good condition, and had used a drainage culvert under a logging road to stay out of the elements. The family was airlifted out of the forest and taken to a nearby hospital for a checkup; local news reports showed the children, walking on their own, wrapped in blankets and wearing parkas as they entered the hospital. Sgt. Steve Rowe of the Paradise Police Department said the family had suffered some hypothermia.

More than 100 rescuers from across Northern California had joined in the hunt for the family.

“Not only were they happy,” Ms. Watts said of the rescued family, “we were all happy.”

    Missing in a Snowy Forest for Days, a Family Is Safe, NYT, 20.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/20missing.html

History of the Faux Tree

November 8, 2007
Filed at 6:23 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Love them or not, today's artificial Christmas trees don't have the uniform -- and unrealistic -- appearance of their forbears a generation ago.

High-end trees now do their best to mimic the inconsistencies of a natural tree, with uneven branch sizes, individually shaped needles and variation in color.

And the biggest change in faux trees over the last few decades is the move away from the jigsaw-puzzle tree of many little pieces toward a typically three-part tree that opens like an umbrella, says Janet Denton, Christmas buyer for Sears.

Pre-lit trees also have caught on, she says.

An artificial Christmas tree first appeared in Sears' 1910 catalog. It had a wooden base, five candle attachments, 25 branches and was decorated with red berries.

The price? 23 cents.

By 1915, some of the trees, mounted in large white pots with thick branches covered with heavy imitation foliage, could cost up to 98 cents, according to Sears' records. In the 1945 Christmas catalog, the retailer was touting trees with branches covered with a dark green straw-like yarn that was supposed to imitate pine needles.

Glamorous nylon net trees were advertised in the 1950s, and '60s artificial trees were a mix of aluminum, plastic and vinyl. All sides of the tree had a uniform shape in 1968.

By 1972, however, color variation between light and dark green and even some blue became popular for a more natural look, although some came tinged with ''snow.''

If you are drawn to an artificial tree, either for practical or environmental reasons, Sara Ruffin Costello, creative director of the style magazine Domino, says there are two options to pulling it off: One is to choose a tasteful, simple artificial tree. The other is to embrace kitsch.

''I wouldn't go for green,'' Costello says. ''I'd go for white or silver. ... A white tree with black balls, or silver tree with glass and silver ornaments and metallic garlands. I'd try to keep it just this side of not being tacky. If you have a real sense of humor, you can go all out and get away with it.''

    History of the Faux Tree, NYT, 8.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-SPE-Holidays-Artificial-Trees.html

Well, that's Christmas out of the way. Time now for some serious shopping

December 27, 2006
The Times
Sam Coates and Marcus Leroux

Busiest week is just beginning

Luxury goods fuelling the trend

It took just five hours before the magic of Christmas Day had worn off and British shoppers had once again embraced their “selfish gene”.

Yesterday Britons engaged in the biggest hunt for presents for themselves, besieging high streets and shopping centres across the country at the start of a three-week, £5.2 billion spending bonanza.

They are expected to spend even more money after Christmas than before, with the largest stores predicting that their busiest days of the year would come between now and January.

With some stores starting their online sales on Christmas Day, and others offering discounts of up to 75 per cent, this year looks likely to be one of the best for consumers for several years.

Selfridges in Oxford Street, Central London, said that record numbers came through the doors yesterday, with 2,000 people queueing from 5am. The Trafford Centre in Manchester was visited by an estimated 130,000 bargain-hunters, 10,000 up on last year’s high.

Shoppers have already defied predictions of a lacklustre Christmas after two rises in interest rates, consumer debt and sharp rises in energy bills.

John Lewis said that Christmas sales hit £94.3 million, an all-time high, while the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham said that Christmas sales had grown 0.6 per cent, with average spending increasing by 10 per cent.

Heavy discounting of luxury items is fuelling the trend — yesterday the first item bought at Selfridges in Birmingham was a Chloé Betty bag, reduced from £939 to £469. At the chain’s store in Oxford Street, managers opened half an hour early to enable the hordes to get to the discounted Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags.

Victoria Mackey, who left Wales at 5am to reach Sel- fridges in Oxford Street, said: “We came last year and I saved more than £800 on handbags and shoes on the regular price. I’m hoping to get some good bargains again.”

Sally Goodwood, 18, a fashion student from Ilford, Essex, said that the Oxford Street sales were “worth every single elbow in the rib”. She said: “I got a pair of Bertie boots reduced from £195 to £91 and a pair of Diesel jeans I have been debating buying for ages reduced from £100 to £60.”

Tom Denison, a psychologist from SPSL, the retail analysts, said that, despite the moaning from traditionalists about the commercialisation of Boxing Day, the post-Christmas sales frenzy was driven by consumers buying for themselves with increased enthusiasm.

“The fact that more retailers are opening on Boxing Day means that others have traded well in the past. It’s driven by people’s behaviour. That’s different from the people who are scavenging for bargains and trying to get as much as possible for as little as possible.”

He added that discounts in the luxury sector were making a significant difference to the post-Christmas rush.

At Selfridges in the Bullring centre, Ruth Delany, 32, from Moseley, Birmingham, saved more than £1,000 when she spent £2,033 on designer handbags and shoes. “I left home at seven this morning and I was first in the queue at the Gucci counter — I couldn’t wait to get started,” she said.

While 90 per cent of outlets in shopping centres opened yesterday, a few — including Marks & Spencer and all John Lewis stores apart from Manchester — were holding back their opening for today. Half a million people are likely to visit the West End today.

The Bluewater shopping centre in Kent attracted 75,000 people yesterday, but is expecting three times as many today.

The situation in England and Wales now all but mirrors Scotland, where Boxing Day has been a normal shopping day for many years.

'Our car park was maxed out'


Bluewater, Kent

“Our busiest period is actually the week after Christmas. This year we estimate that over 900,000 people will visit Bluewater in the week ending January 1”

Matt Clements, executive general manager of Bluewater

Bargain Canon PowerShot A710 digital camera which was £229 but has been slashed to £150 at Jessops

Meadowhall, Sheffield

“The car parks are 85 per cent full. It looks promising and by the end of the day we expect between 80,000 and 90,000 people to have visited here”

Mohammad Dajani, centre director

Bargain A 42in Panasonic TV reduced from £1,299 to £899 at Currys

Trafford Centre, Manchester

“It has been a slower start to the Christmas period, but once started people have definitely had money to spend — and have been spending a terrific amount”

Lucy Sharp

Bargain A Miss Sixty V-neck dress, down to £21 from £70 at USC

Castle Court, Belfast

“Our sales were up 3 per cent in the run-up to Christmas and that looks to be continuing. Our car park was completely maxed out between 1pm and 3pm and many stores had a queue outside them before they opened”

Caroline Magee, marketing manager, Castle Court

Bargain Debenhams had 70 per cent off home furniture

Jenners, Edinburgh

“We’ve been busy all day and had lots of people queueing this morning. Our star departments have been men’s and womenswear where we’ve got up to 85 per cent off selected items.”

Alan Thomlinson, assistant store manager

Bargain Linea suit: £15 down from £120 — sold out by lunchtime

    Well, that's Christmas out of the way. Time now for some serious shopping, Ts, 27.12.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2519812,00.html

Church Is Robbed During Christmas Mass

December 26, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and COLIN MOYNIHAN

The morning heist in Flushing, Queens, yesterday seemed too bad to be true.

It happened at the Church of St. Mel during the 9 a.m. Christmas Mass, which was said in Italian. The parishioners had helped fill the safe in the sacristy with something north of $20,000, including money for needy children. The thieves, according to police and witness accounts, opened the safe, and lugged a heavy metal box with the money to a white sport utility vehicle with Vermont license plates.

There are, certainly, much more heinous offenses, especially considering that the collection in the safe consisted mostly of checks that could be stopped, and that the whole amount was insured. But the nerve shown by the thieves made it hard — especially for parishioners who had attended the church for decades — to imagine a worse transgression.

“I’m shocked,” said Claudia DiMaggio, 36, who went to the church’s grammar school. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

The Rev. Christopher J. Turczany, who was saying Mass at the time of the theft, still sounded shaken in an interview after the noon service. “They were very bold — not even scared,” said Father Turczany, who believes he saw one of the thieves about an hour before the robbery. That it happened on Christmas, he added, “is heartbreaking.” But he was thankful no one was hurt, recalling a violent episode at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2002 when a man waved a gun at a priest in the church’s rectory before shooting himself in the chin.

The police said last night that there had been no arrest.

Established in 1941 and named after a nephew of St. Patrick, St. Mel’s sits in a neighborhood of well-kept brick houses with trimmed shrubbery, on 154th Street between 26th and 27th Avenues. “It’s the kind of place you could leave your side door open and not worry,” Ms. DiMaggio said.

That was the door the thieves used to leave, according to Father Turczany.

He said that about 8:30 a.m., as he was preparing for Mass, he saw a man in a striped gray winter hat — “full faced,” as he put it, with an olive complexion — wandering near a staircase close to the sacristy. Nearby was the safe, which contained church valuables, including money from collections and a gold chalice.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for a bathroom,’ ” Father Turczany said. “I told him, ‘Well, you’re going the wrong way.’ My suspicion was aroused.”

After directing the man, who he said weighed more than 200 pounds, to the bathroom, Father Turczany warned the sacristans, Nicholas Nangino, 19, and Christopher Urena, 20, to keep an eye out. Then he went into the sanctuary to start the Mass. “I spoke about the shepherds who came to see the newborn Christ,” he said.

Perhaps half an hour later, the sacristans, looking down a hallway, heard sounds and saw lights flickering on and off. Already on their guard, they went to investigate.

“It was a diversion,” Mr. Nangino said. “We find nothing downstairs. We find the safe open upstairs.”

It was unclear how someone had been able to open the safe. Father Turczany said that a lever on the safe was “in an open position — but locked,” without elaborating. The chalice was left behind, but a box, described by Father Turczany as a 2-foot cube and an “absolute heavy dead weight,” was gone.

The police said a witness, whom they would not identify, watched the men take the box to their car, a white Lincoln Navigator. The witness apparently asked them about the box, and the men said it was equipment used to install an elevator.

All this occurred during Mass, causing some confusion. As Father Turczany, standing at the altar, prepared to deliver the final blessing, an usher frantically signaled him.

The box contained cash and checks from the last four collections, between $20,000 and $30,000, though Father Turczany said it had not been counted. Some of the money was earmarked for church expenses, while the rest was intended for poor children in Brooklyn and Queens.

“Here we are trying to help people, and they come over here and help themselves,” said Dominick Foglio, 82.

    Church Is Robbed During Christmas Mass, NYT, 26.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/nyregion/26church.html


 

Alexandra Hughes, left,

her grandparents Phyllis and Ed Toohey and her brother Andrew Hughes

at a Christmas Eve service at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan.

Erin Wigger for The New York Times

Pope Offers Christmas Prayers for Peace        NYT        25.12.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Pope-Christmas.html


 

A Christmas in the City, Revealing Wishes of All Kinds

December 26, 2006
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

There is no Christmas in New York. There are Christmases. How, after all, could it be possible to contain within a word the vastly different variations that the city mounts each year?

From the quiet pleasures of a working-class family opening presents in the Bronx to a father and son in matching bow ties taking holy communion on the Upper East Side, Christmas is a mirror and a lodestar for the city, reflecting its diversity and affirming its separate parts.

There are tourists looking at the Rockefeller Center tree and Jews looking for a decent Chinese meal. And there is a homeless man looking for something as simple — and as difficult to find — as a gift.

Here are a few scenes from these Christmases, a day that, at least in New York, makes sense only in the plural.

Starting Fresh in a New Home

The two girls opened their presents in a pajama-clad frenzy. Jade, 10, wrapped her arms around Winnie the Pooh. Veronica, 7, carefully arranged her new Bratz dolls inside a silver toy convertible.

The girls’ parents, Javier and Victoria Perez, had gifts waiting for them under the tree as well, but they were in no rush. They had, in a sense, opened their Christmas gift on Dec. 13, when they opened the door of their new apartment and moved in.

“That’s worth more than a million bucks to me,” said Mr. Perez, 44.

This was Christmas in the South Bronx, in the poorest Congressional district in the country, where happiness can be as simple as an affordable rent.

For about 10 years, the Perez family lived in a one-bedroom apartment near Yankee Stadium. The girls slept in bunk beds at one end of the bedroom, the parents in a bed at the other end. The kitchen had one cabinet.

In 2002, Mr. Perez was laid off from his office job at the Chase Manhattan Bank.

He enrolled at City College and landed a part-time job in the admissions office there. Mrs. Perez worked in customer service at a Macy’s facility in New Jersey. They needed to go on welfare to make ends meet.

Lately, though, things seem to have taken a turn for the better: The Perezes qualified for a two-bedroom apartment in a new housing complex for low-income residents on East 163rd Street, at the edge of Morrisania, with rent of $720 a month.

Mr. Perez expects to graduate in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies, and had an interview recently for a full-time job in city government. “Everything is coming into place,” he said.

On Christmas morning in Apartment 2G, Mr. Perez sat on the sofa watching Latin singers on television. Mrs. Perez, 39, was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs with one eye on the oven, where she was roasting pernil, pork shoulder.

Jade and Veronica sat on the hardwood floor, ripping, pulling and cutting at gifts, many of them provided by an after-school program run by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, a Bronx nonprofit.

It was hard to tell who was more excited: the girls, or their father. Mr. Perez loves Christmas. Last year, he dressed up as Santa Claus for the after-school program’s holiday party. Two days after they moved into the new apartment, he bought a Christmas tree — a real one, not a fake one like they had at their other place.

MANNY FERNANDEZ

Taking Pride in Family Traditions

Father and son stood near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 90th Street, chatting about nothing in particular as hundreds of people filed into the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest — some regulars, many not.

The Hugheses are regulars. They have come to this Christmas Eve service for as long as 22-year-old Andrew Hughes has been alive.

The matriarchs of the family had already secured a 10th-row pew. They make it a habit to arrive well before the Festival Holy Eucharist begins at 11 p.m.

There is an unmistakable air of regality in the austere church, where the operatic voices bounce off the vaulted ceilings. “It’s a tradition, this is the family tradition,” said Andrew’s father, Jefferson Hughes, 57. “We have a lot of them this time of year.”

For example, Mr. Hughes long ago taught Andrew how to tie a bow tie, and each man wore his proudly, the father’s red, his son’s, green. They feast on leg of lamb every year.

As Andrew has grown up, of course, traditions adjust. Last year he was working in Colorado and did not return home to New York for the first time; nevertheless, he assured his parents, he did attend the Eve of the Nativity service at an Episcopal church there.

This year, in another first, Andrew baked the pair of pecan pies for the requisite holiday dessert.

“It’s part of my moving home and helping out,” he said earnestly. “Yes, I have to be a good son.”

Andrew is deciding whether to remain in New York or to take a job in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

His father said he had given Andrew plenty of “balanced advice” about how to make his decision, as well as, for Christmas, some skis, noting, “We tend to be practical in our gifts.”

Andrew looked up at the snowless sky, mentioned the balmy weather and observed: “I guess skis would be more practical in Wyoming.”

JENNIFER MEDINA

Homeless, but Eager to Give

Wadud Rashid Mohammed searched for Christmas gifts yesterday in the one place he could afford them: a garbage can on the corner of 110th and Broadway. It was 6:45 a.m. The sun was down, the pickings were slim.

Mr. Mohammed cut a fragile figure in the darkness: a tall, thin man going through the trash. He discarded a pizza box on the sidewalk. He stopped to consider the pages of a soggy magazine. A box of Christmas lights caught his eye, but it was empty. Same with the 40-ounce bottle of domestic beer.

He sighed, stood up, scratched his head beneath a soiled wool cap. “Being that it’s Christmas, there’s not too much to work with here.”

It has become a holiday tradition over the last 10 years, Mr. Mohammed said, canvassing the trash bins of the Upper West Side for presents for his children. His boy is 10, his girl, 14. Both live with their mothers.

That’s what happens, he explained, when you have no job, no home.

Mr. Mohammed is 40 now and would like New York to know a few things. First of all, he has not always been homeless. Also: he used to have a job.

He shined shoes, which he was proud to do, he said, because a man can make a living shining shoes. But what he dreamed of all along was architecture, “building buildings way up into the sky.”

Then, when he was 21, Mr. Mohammed said, he crossed a street in Hoboken, N.J., and a sports car ran him down. It was a Porsche, he said; even now the word comes out like spit.

There were lawsuits. He signed some papers that he did not understand.

In his leg, the tibia and fibula were broken, and have been replaced with steel.

“I never got nothin’ for Christmas, nothin’,” Mr. Mohammed said, “even when I was small. You imagine that? Fourteen years old and you get nothin’ for Christmas?”

As the sun came up on the street corner, Mr. Mohammed found a tennis shoe and slipped it into his bag.

ALAN FEUER

Speaking Chinese, Dining Kosher

Kent Zhang knew that few, if any, of his customers at Buddha Bodai, his vegetarian — and kosher — restaurant in Chinatown were there to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but he greeted each with a hearty “Merry Christmas!” nonetheless. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Harry!” he shouted cheerfully to an Orthodox Jew in a black hat and beard.

Harry, it turns out, was Zvi Bar-Lavan. He did not seem to mind being called Harry or being wished a Merry Christmas.

“Oh wait, you don’t celebrate that!” Mr. Zhang said in mock surprise.

“It’s O.K.,” Mr. Bar-Lavan replied, smiling. “He was one of us.”

And such was the observance of Judaism’s unwritten Eleventh Commandment: Thou shall eat Chinese food and see a movie on Christmas.

Mr. Zhang is delighted to accommodate the custom. On Monday, his small shop at the corner of Mott and Worth Streets began filling up at noon; by 2 p.m., more than 180 meals had been served.

“Usually there’s a break in the middle, but it don’t look like it will be that way today,” Mr. Zhang said between ringing up orders of shark fin soup and roasted pork — made with bean curd. “This place is good for everyone. Kosher just means clean, and everyone wants clean food.”

At one table, more than a dozen practitioners of the martial art Chi Cong exchanged conversation in rapid fire Cantonese. At another, a small group of Israelis chatted loudly in Hebrew.

The restaurant’s clientele is evenly divided, he said, between Jews and Chinese people. And yes: there are a handful of Chinese Jews who come in from time to time.

A Buddhist himself, Mr. Zhang has been a vegetarian for 12 years. He started with a vegetarian Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens, eight years ago, and expanded to Manhattan in 2004.

Business on Christmas goes up about 30 percent over a typical weekday, as regulars combine with once-a-year pilgrims. The rookies can be spotted by their surprise when Mr. Zhang thanks them in Hebrew, saying “todah rabbah” as they pay their bill.

One customer on Monday took his takeout from Mr. Zhang and said “Xie xie”— thank you in Mandarin.

Glancing at the man’s yarmulke as he walked out the door, Mr. Zhang called after him: “Bevakasha! Lehitraot!”

“You’re welcome! See you later!”

JENNIFER MEDINA

A Sight Worth Seeing — Twice

Sometimes you have to see something twice to really see it. Especially when that something is the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and you are with a friend from abroad who has never seen it at all. So it was that Earth Bennett, 30, and Yohei Kawagoe, 29, sat in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue, waiting for night to fall.

They had already seen the tree once, while the sun was out. But Mr. Bennett, who is originally from Maine, and Mr. Kawagoe, who grew up in a Tokyo suburb — “the New Jersey of Japan,” Mr. Bennett explained — deemed it less impressive by day. There were no lights to throw a glow into the air, Mr. Kawagoe noticed, and too many people. They decided to come back later.

In the meantime, they meandered along Fifth Avenue for an hour or so, watching men sell counterfeit handbags or hustle tourists with games of three-card monte. Then they got a warm drink and waited.

“You couldn’t do this with your friends from Williamsburg,” said Mr. Bennett, who wore an eggplant-colored turtleneck. “They would be too cool to do it.”

Mr. Kawagoe, who has been working as an assistant in a pre-kindergarten class in a small town in Pennsylvania, was more amenable to the hype. “It’s the most famous Christmas tree in the world,” he said. Mr. Bennett smiled broadly, as if in triumph.

In Japan, he noted, Christmas has no religious overtone, but is widely celebrated as a kind of holiday collage, one part Valentine’s Day, one part shopping spree. He wanted to see how it was done in America. (Not, it turns out, entirely differently.) When the sun went down, the two friends left the cafe, chatting in a mix of Japanese and English. Rain began to fall, and umbrella hawkers immediately materialized. By the time they reached the Atlas sculpture, several thousand other people appeared to have done the same. They beheld a solid crush of umbrellas, interlocked, like the shields of a Greek phalanx.

“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Kawagoe, who took a picture. They soldiered gamely through, past a grim line of wet, would-be ice-skaters, past the other tourists. They gazed upward, catching glimpses of the now-illuminated tree through the forest of umbrellas.

The rainfall grew stronger, and Mr. Kawagoe wiped the water from his eyes, reverently.

“I’m seeing in person what I’ve only seen on TV before,” he said. “I feel like I’m really in New York now.”

NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

    A Christmas in the City, Revealing Wishes of All Kinds, NYT, 26.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/nyregion/26xmas.html

Pope Offers Christmas Prayers for Peace

December 25, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI urged a solution to conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and Africa, in a Christmas Day address that included an appeal for the poor, the exploited, and all those who suffer.

''With deep apprehension I think, on this festive day, of the Middle East, marked by so many grave crises and conflicts, and I express my hope that the way will be opened to a just and lasting peace,'' Benedict said Monday.

The Pope singled out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speech.

''I place in the hands of the divine Child of Bethlehem the indications of a resumption of dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which we have witnessed in recent days, and the hope of further encouraging developments,'' the pontiff said from a balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square.

The pope also mentioned violence in Lebanon, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Darfur and the whole of Africa, as Ethiopian fighter jets bombed airports in Somalia and more people died in suicide bombings in Iraq.

Under his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, the Christmas Day message became an occasion to review progress and setbacks for humanity. Benedict noted Monday that despite its modern-day successes, the world remains in desperate need of a savior.

''This humanity of the 21st century appears as sure and self-sufficient master of its own destiny, the avid proponent of uncontested triumphs,'' the pope said. ''Yet this is not the case. People continue to die of hunger and thirst, disease and poverty, in this age of plenty and unbridled consumerism.''

    Pope Offers Christmas Prayers for Peace, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Pope-Christmas.html

Worship God Not Technology, Pope Says on Christmas

December 25, 2006
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Mankind, which has reached other planets and decoded the genetic instructions for life, should not presume it can live without God, Pope Benedict said in his Christmas message on Monday.

In an age of unbridled consumerism it was shameful many remained deaf to the ``heart-rending cry'' of those dying of hunger, thirst, disease, poverty, war and terrorism, he said.

``Does a 'Saviour' still have any value and meaning for the men and women of the third millennium?'' he asked in his ``Urbi et Orbi'' (to the city and the world) message to the faithful in St Peter's Square, broadcast live to millions in 40 countries.

``Is a 'Saviour' still needed by a humanity which has reached the moon and Mars and is prepared to conquer the universe; for a humanity which knows no limits in its pursuit of nature's secrets and which has succeeded even in deciphering the marvelous codes of the human genome?''

He appealed for peace and justice in the Middle East, an end to the brutal violence in Iraq and to the fratricidal conflict in Darfur and other parts of Africa, and expressed his hope for ``a democratic Lebanon.''

In a separate, written message to the small Christian communities of the Middle East, the Pope said he hoped to visit the Holy Land as soon as the situation allowed.

Speaking to tens of thousands of people in a sunny square, he wished the world a Happy Christmas in 62 languages -- including Arabic, Hebrew, Mongolian and Latin -- but his speech highlighted his preoccupation with humanity's fate.

SUFFERING HUMANITY

Marking the second Christmas season of his pontificate, he said that while 21st century man appeared to be a master of his own destiny, ``perhaps he needs a saviour all the more'' because much of humanity was suffering.

``People continue to die of hunger and thirst, disease and poverty, in this age of plenty and of unbridled consumerism,'' he said from the central balcony of Christendom's largest church.

``Some people remain enslaved, exploited and stripped of their dignity; others are victims of racial and religious hatred, hampered by intolerance and discrimination, and by political interference and physical or moral coercion with regard to the free profession of their faith.

``Others see their own bodies and those of their dear ones, particularly their children, maimed by weaponry, by terrorism and by all sorts of violence, at a time when everyone invokes and acclaims progress, solidarity and peace for all.''

The Pope also made reference to the controversial case of Piergiorgio Welby, a paralyzed Italian man who was denied a Catholic funeral because he had asked to die.

``What are we to think of those who choose death in the belief that they are celebrating life?'' he said.

Welby, an advocate of euthanasia, died on Wednesday after a doctor gave him sedatives and detached a respirator that had kept the victim of advanced muscular dystrophy alive for years.

In his midnight mass for some 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica earlier on Monday, the Pope said the image of the baby Jesus in a manger should remind everyone of the plight of poor, abused and neglected children the world over.

At that mass a member of the congregation read a prayer in Arabic asking God to encourage ``a spirit of dialogue, mutual understanding and collaboration'' among followers of the three great monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

    Worship God Not Technology, Pope Says on Christmas, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-christmas-pope.html

Christmas Means Giving for Wade and Wife

December 25, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MIAMI (AP) -- A kid jumped atop a picnic table, threw his tiny arms in the air and let out a loud, delightful shriek.

''Here he comes!'' yelled the boy, who couldn't have been older than 8 or 9.

With that, the 250 or so underprivileged kids crammed in the back of a South Florida arcade began stampeding toward the guest of honor. Their tiny hands smudged the windows he walked by on his way to greet them, and they all began screaming indistinguishably as he neared the entrance.

Later, when asked what he thought of the tiny mob, Dwyane Wade shook his head and laughed.

''That was cool,'' Wade said. ''Crazy. It's something that's very special to me.''

The Miami Heat guard is an NBA champion, a finals MVP for his work against the Dallas Mavericks last June, a multimillionaire and one of sport's most recognizable faces.

Yet he still marvels about making kids yell when he shows up to throw a Christmas party.

''See, to us, this is what the holidays are about now,'' says Siohvaughn Wade, Dwyane's wife.

It used to be different.

The Wades would do what just about everyone else does Christmas morning: Wake up early, rush to the tree and start ripping into the pile of wrapped boxes.

That was before they could afford to give themselves whatever they wanted.

These days, with Wade in the final year of his first NBA contract -- one paying him $3.84 million this season -- and less than a year away from entering a new deal that should pay him somewhere in the range of $63 million over the next four seasons, money is no longer a concern.

So how many elaborate gifts are awaiting Wade on this Christmas, when he'll lead his Miami Heat in a nationally televised afternoon game against fellow superstar guard Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers?

Apparently, none.

''People like us 'get' all the time,'' Siohvaughn Wade says. ''Constantly getting, constantly buying stuff, always getting something for free. So for the last three or four years, we haven't done the thing where we set a bunch of presents under a tree. We don't feel like there's a need anymore. Now, to be honest, we just give.''

Wade arranged for his Converse shoes and brand of clothing to be distributed Saturday at his mother's place of worship, the New Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Chicago, and soon will be sending another 100 pairs of kids' sneakers to the same church for another giveaway.

He's sent shoes to soldiers in Iraq, and to people struggling after Hurricane Katrina.

He's helped others privately and, truthfully, he'd rather do it all without fanfare.

''It's about giving. That's what Christmas means to me more so than anything,'' Wade says. ''It's not just giving presents, giving certain gifts. It's about giving what you can. For me and my family, it's about giving love, about giving cheers, about giving joy, putting smiles on kids' faces because they're the future. Hopefully, when they get older, they'll pass it on and it'll keep going down the line.''

This holiday is a pretty important work day for Wade, too.

His Heat -- still without Shaquille O'Neal, who's recovering from knee surgery -- are floundering under .500, yet are only 3 1/2 games out of first in the Southeast Division with a 12-14 record.

Defending the title has not been easy for Miami, which has not had its projected starting five of Wade, Udonis Haslem, Jason Williams, O'Neal and Antoine Walker together on the floor yet this season.

''I've got to try to get away from trying to put it all on my shoulders and say 'OK, Dwyane, you've got to go make every play,''' Wade says. ''I've got to continue to trust my teammates, continue to trust that we will turn it around -- because we will turn it around. Trying times will judge a team. Trying times will judge a man.''

Just as the last two Heat-Lakers Christmas games were billed as ''Kobe vs. Shaq'' extravaganzas fueled by rivalry between the former Tinseltown teammates, this one comes with a tangible sense of ''Kobe vs. Dwyane.''

Bryant is averaging 33.8 points to Wade's 23.6 in five head-to-head meetings. But Wade has come away with the win in three of those.

''Two great players,'' says Heat forward Dorell Wright, one of Wade's closest friends. ''Kobe and D-Wade are two of the three best players in the NBA, along with Shaq. It's going to be fun.''

Wade cringes at any notion of a Dwyane-versus-Kobe sort of buildup.

''Kobe makes you step your game up, step your leadership up,'' Wade says, ''because you know he's going to do the same. But it's not a 1-on-1 matchup. It's not about that, at the end of the day.''

In an 11-minute conversation this past week with The Associated Press, Wade used the word ''blessing'' four times.

It applies to his newfound fame and fortune. It applies to becoming an NBA champion at 24.

It applies to his son, Zaire, now 4, and the new baby Dwyane and Siohvaughn are poised to welcome in about five months.

And he used the word when talking about spending a few hours three days before Christmas with those 250 kids who ate, drank, ran with him through the laser tag room and had a free throw contest -- in which, by the way, one kid outscored both Wade and Wright, who came along for the party.

''When he does things like this, often he'll say that if someone did something like it or came where he lived and did something like this for children when he was a kid, that'd have made a difference in his life,'' Siohvaughn Wade says. ''He says that often. So he's out to tell these kids something they need to know -- that there's something more out there for them. That's what Christmas means to us now.''

    Christmas Means Giving for Wade and Wife, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/sports/AP-BKN-Heat-Wades-Christmas.html

Card From '53 Still Exchanged by Friends

    Card From '53 Still Exchanged by Friends, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Repeating-Greetings.html

Editorial

December 25, 2006
The New York Times

What would you say if you had to explain Christmas to someone who knew nothing about it? You might begin with the shepherds in the fields by night or Santa at the North Pole or even the druidic appeal of a winter festival that comes just when the sun seems most meager. Redemption and rejoicing, feasting and singing, humility and awe — these would all be parts of your answer, as would the perennial cast of characters who people this turning time of year. The personal explanations would come easiest: the rituals of Christmas Eve, the smell of fresh balsam, the stillness of a world cloaked in snow. You would probably have something to say about the importance of family and the force of a holiday whose strongest emotions center upon children, and upon our memories of being children.

And yet to really explain Christmas you would also have to try to answer the question that seems more pressing every year: how do those emotions and memories connect to the frenzied commercial machinery of the weeks that lead up to Christmas? What does all that retailing and wrapping paper have to do with peace on earth? There is no glossing over the problem — not to a puzzled stranger and not to ourselves. What matters is not just the disjunction between the majesty of those old hymns and the immodesty of this shopping season. It is that all those presents did not really catch the feeling we were looking for, did not say what we hoped to say.

A stranger might well wonder, don’t you always hope for peace on earth? Does good will really have a season? And if you genuinely love one another — truly hold one another in your hearts — wouldn’t simply saying it be far more eloquent than any other gift that you could give? These questions point to something most of us already know, that for all the push and pull of the Christmas rush, for all the sputtering of the commercial volcano that erupts at the end of every year, this is truly a holiday of modest spirit, a day of humble aspirations. What we want is to love and know we are loved and to imagine a world that lives up to the purity of that feeling.

    How We Say Christmas, NYT, 25.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/opinion/25mon1.html

Jewish in a Winter Wonderland

December 24, 2006
the New York Times
By CINDY CHUPACK

I BLAME the Pottery Barn holiday catalog for the fact that my husband and I, both Jews, spent last weekend at Home Depot picking out a Christmas tree. I cannot blame our kids who begged us mercilessly for a tree, because we do not yet have kids. I cannot blame my parents, because although my dad initially supported George Bush, he never supported the Hanukkah bush.

In fact, I recall that he was extremely judgmental of one Jewish family in the place I grew up (Tulsa), who did have a Christmas tree every year. Even though it was decorated exclusively with blue ornaments and silver bows, my dad made it clear to my sister and me that he thought the whole Jews-with-trees movement was in very poor taste.

Then again, my dad was a man who, in his wood-paneled wet bar, had highball glasses featuring busty women whose clothes disappeared when the glass was full. So I learned early on that taste was subjective.

Fast forward to last month. My husband and I have been married a year and a half, and I am flipping through the Pottery Barn holiday catalog while he sorts the mail, and page after page is something beautiful and not for us, because we are Jews. In my humble opinion, Jews have yet to make Hanukkah decorations beautiful, unless you consider a blue-and-white paper dreidel beautiful, but what can you expect from a holiday whose spelling is constantly up for debate.

So as I browsed past velvet monogrammed stockings and quilted tree skirts and pine wreaths and silver-plated picture frames that doubled as stocking holders (genius!), I said to myself, as much as to my husband: “This is why I sometimes wish I celebrated Christmas. Everything looks so cozy and inviting.” And much to my surprise, he said, “We can celebrate Christmas if you want.” And like a 12-year-old, I said, “We can?” And he said, “Sure.”

It seemed so subversive. Christmas? Really? I thought about it for a moment. Or rather, I thought about what my parents would think. But my parents live 1,200 miles away. They weren’t visiting this season. They wouldn’t even need to know. (Unless, of course, they read about it in The Times. Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad!)

Still, even just considering the idea felt wrong and dirty and, well, totally exhilarating, like your first night away at college, when you realize you can stay out until dawn because nobody is waiting up for you. My husband and I were consenting adults. This was our house. Why couldn’t we celebrate whatever we wanted?

We decided we could, and proceeded to embrace the holiday in all of its materialistic glory. For example, I know it can be annoying to you Christmas veterans, but right now I love nothing more than hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” while I’m shopping for stocking stuffers. I love stocking stuffers. I love having stockings to stuff. I love the fact that whole sections of many stores, from CVS to Neiman Marcus, have opened up to me. I love tinsel. It’s so simple, yet so elegant!

I love that as soon as I told a Catholic friend what I was up to, she invited me to a gingerbread-house decorating party. How fun is that? And why wasn’t I invited before? What does a gingerbread house have to do with Jesus?

So here we are: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) not because we secretly want to convert to Christianity, but because the rampant commercialization of Christmas works! Like your kids who desperately want the toys they see advertised on TV, I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and my husband wanted the model train that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.

That train (which took two hours to assemble) was the first sign that our Christmas may not be all peace on earth, good will toward men. The vision dancing in my head was clearly Pottery Barn, whereas his, I fear, was SkyMall.

He bought blinking colored lights when I was definitely thinking white, and he ordered old-timey glass ornaments — a slice of pizza, a mermaid, a hippo — instead of the jewel-colored balls I had in mind.

And he keeps talking about the fake snow ("Should we get the blanket or just use cotton balls?") when I wasn’t thinking fake snow at all. I definitely haven’t seen any fake snow in the Pottery Barn catalog. And then at Home Depot, I practically had to pry the mechanical lawn snowman out of his hands. He’s like a Christmas crackhead — had a taste and now he can’t stop.

But despite our differences, we both love our little winter wonderland. Some nights, I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD, light a fire, turn on the tree and play with the different settings, put liquid smoke in the train’s smokestack and turn on the choo-choo sound effects and then I sit back and enjoy my first Christmas, in all its kitschy splendor. I feel a little guilty when I look at our lone menorah on the mantel (the only evidence of my faith other than my guilt), but I ask you: how can this much pleasure be wrong?

Before you answer that in a snappy letter to the editor, fellow Jews (including you, Dad), let me just say that I’m pretty sure that if we’re fortunate enough to have children, we will raise them with the same arbitrary rules we were raised with, trying our best to sell that old chestnut (roasting on an open fire) that “eight nights is better than one,” and putting this tradition behind us until the kids go off to college, if not forever.

On the other hand, maybe it’s nice to teach children that holidays can be done à la carte. Every religion, every culture has so many beautiful rituals and traditions to choose from. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating. I can hardly wait for Hanukkwanzaa.

Cindy Chupack, a writer and executive producer of “Sex and the City,” is the author of “The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays.”

    Jewish in a Winter Wonderland, NYT, 24.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/fashion/24PotteryBarn.html?em&ex=1167282000&en=59c1c23f2d85a21b&ei=5087%0A

Stores look to post-Christmas sales, weekend's business not as robust as expected

Updated 12/24/2006 4:46 PM ET
The Associated Press
USA Today

Bargain hunters and latecomers flocked to stores this weekend as the retail industry made its last big push for pre-Christmas sales with increased discounts and other come-ons.

But the late-buying binge was not enough to meet sales goals, and retailers are now turning to post-Christmas business to make this season a merry one, according to one report from a national research company.

"These were big days, but they came up short in terms of traffic and sales," said Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a research firm, referring to this past Friday and Saturday. ShopperTrak monitors total retail sales at more than 45,000 outlets.

After a stronger-than-expected turnout on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, stores struggled through the first two weeks of December as consumers shopped at a disappointing pace.

Mild temperatures throughout most of the country didn't inspire shoppers to buy winter items. And with Christmas falling on a Monday, the season became another nail biter for retailers as consumers procrastinated with a full weekend to shop before the holiday.

"This is the best time in the world to shop," said Chuck Mingrone of East Haven, Conn., who was leaving a Bath & Body Works stores on Sunday at the Westfield Connecticut Post Mall in Milford, Conn., on Sunday, the day before Christmas. He said he expects to do all of his holiday shopping in two hours.

"I do it every year like this," Mingrone continued. "There are no lines and everyone is smiling. Every year, my family makes fun of me for doing this, but they are the ones who are frantic in lines."

Others were forced to shop late for lack of time or because they hadn't been in the mood.

"I don't know. Christmas just crept up on me this year," said Aimee Lovan of Des Moines, who was at the Valley West Mall in West Des Moines. "And also the weather. It's been so warm so I haven't been in a Christmas mood."

Based on data released late Sunday by ShopperTrak, sales for both Friday and Saturday generated a combined $16.2 billion, with Saturday's business generating $8.72 billion. But Martin expected Saturday's sales volume to surpass Black Friday's sales, which posted $8.96 billion.

Based on the weekend's sales results, Martin estimated that holiday sales are so far up 4.3%, short of the 5% forecast.

"We still have the week after Christmas," said Martin. "We are going to need a lot of gift card redemptions." Gift cards are only recorded on a retailers' balance sheet until the cards are redeemed.

This holiday season, consumers shopped early for flat-panel TVs, hot toys like T.M.X. Elmo and new consoles such as Sony's Playstation3, but held off on apparel, creating a mixed holiday picture.

Bright spots have been the online business and luxury stores. But many mall-based apparel chains were challenged by increased competition from department stores such as Federated Department Stores Inc.'s Macy's and J.C. Penney Co., which are benefiting from industry consolidation and fresh fashions.

Still, many mall-based stores kept to their promotional calendar throughout the season, refusing to buckle down to shoppers' pressure for the best deal. This past weekend, stores slashed prices to tempt shoppers to buy, though Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at the NPD Group, a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y., said that most merchants still weren't "panicking." Stores are realizing the holiday season also includes January, he said.

But, some stores were pulling out all the stops. Gap Inc., which has been languishing, took additional markdowns on everything from T-shirts to hooded sweatshirts and jean jackets at its namesake stores. Long-sleeve T-shirts were slashed to $9.99,from $24.50 at a Gap store in Manhattan.

Those who delayed shopping saw big benefits in waiting.

Retired school principal Carol Beck, now of Durham, N.C., was doing most of her holiday shopping Sunday and finished in about 30 minutes. She said she spent $150 and bought most things at 50% off.

Other shoppers were already done, but came to the mall Sunday to see if any other items struck their fancy.

"I buy extra gifts just in case I forget people," said Mina Singzon from Los Angeles, who was at the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, Calif. "That happens sometimes."

Taubman Centers Inc., which operates or owns 23 malls in 11 states, reported that business, based on a sampling of malls, was tracking up mid-single digit percentage increases for the week ended Saturday compared with a year ago. On Saturday, sales were up anywhere from mid-single to low-double digit increases from a year ago.

Billie Scott, spokeswoman at Simon Property Group, which owns or operates 175 malls in 38 states, said that half of the malls that were sampled reported traffic and business on Saturday was about the same as the previous Saturday; the other half said traffic was lighter, though spending was up.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based Macerich Co., which operates 80 malls nationwide, reported that traffic was up 36% in the week ended Saturday from the previous week.

Kathleen Waugh, spokeswoman at Toys "R" Us said this past week was "exceptionally strong, " particularly on Saturday.

Meanwhile, a late buying binge online helped online retailers surpass holiday sales forecasts, according to comScore Networks. Online spending from Nov. 1 through Wednesday reached $21.68 billion, marking a 26% increase compared to the corresponding year-ago period. The results exclude travel, auctions and corporate purchases. ComScore expected holiday sales to rise 24%.

The final days before Christmas and post-holiday business, boosted in party by gift cards redemptions, have becoming increasingly important for retailers.

According to BigResearch, which conducted a poll for the National Retail Federation, consumers are expected to spend a total of $24.81 billion on gift cards this holiday season, up from $18.48 billion in the year-ago period.

Jason Cameron from West Haven, Conn., bought some American Eagle gift cards for his sisters and girlfriend on Sunday.

"They're quick and people can get whatever they want," he said.

Now, stores need Cameron's sisters and girlfriend to redeem them quickly.

    Stores look to post-Christmas sales, weekend's business not as robust as expected, UT, 24.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-24-shopping_x.htm

Bush makes Christmas Eve calls to troops

Updated 12/24/2006 2:14 PM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush, who is spending Christmas at the Camp David presidential retreat, called 10 members of the U.S. military on Sunday to thank them for their service and wish them a happy holiday.

During the calls, which were placed to troops stationed overseas or have recently returned from deployments abroad before 8 a.m. ET, the president asked about the status of troop morale, said deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino.

"He said he wanted to call to let them know how much he appreciates their service and how proud he is of each of them," she said. "He asked them to please pass on his thanks to the men and women they serve with, and to give his best, on this Christmas, to their families."

Bush called the following servicemen and women:

•Army Sgt. Jonathan J. Corell, who has been serving in Afghanistan for 18 months. He has advanced skills in assault weaponry, which he uses while scouting and patrolling. His wife, Danielle, lives in Syracuse, N.Y.

•Army Pfc. Rebekah Vandiver, based out of Schofield, Hawaii, is deployed to Speicher, Iraq. As a combat medic, she is responsible for the prescreening of patients that enter the Battalion Aid Station. Her husband, Stephen, and three children live in Hawaii.

•Marine Sgt. Ricardo E. Contreras, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., is deployed to Fallujah, Iraq. As a career counselor in the Marines, he is responsible for the retention and career development of the enlisted Marines in the 1st Marine Headquarters Group. His wife, Deborah, lives in San Clemente, Calif.

•Marine Lance Cpl. Michael P. Matherne is a member of the Marine Fighter Attack Squadron-211 and the Marine Air Group-16 out of Yuma, Ariz. He is serving in Al Asad, Iraq, as an aircraft communications and navigation weapons systems technician and repairs the squadrons 16 AV-8B Harrier jets.

•Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dwayne W. Meyer, a member of the Provincial Reconstruction Team at Naval Station North Island in San Diego, Calif. As a communications specialist in Kala Gosh, Afghanistan, he repairs communication devices, including satellite radios. His wife, Rebecca, lives in Chula Vista, Calif.

•Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Rahm Panjwani, who serves aboard the USS Boxer. As the ship's sailor of the year in 2005, he led 60 personnel in the safe receipt, transfer and delivery of more than 2 million gallons of aviation fuel during more than 2,100 aircraft refuelings. His wife, Heather, lives in San Antonio, Texas.

•Air Force Master Sgt. John W. Gahan, who serves in the 40th Airlift Squadron at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, has been with the Air Force for more than 17 years. He is deployed to Al Muthana Air Base, Iraq, with the 23rd Air Force Squadron, and provides upgrade training to new Iraqi C-130 fleet aviators. His wife, Karen, lives in Abilene, Texas.

•Air Force Tech. Sgt. Mark S. Pleis Jr., who serves in the Defense Information Systems Agency in Stuttgart, Germany, where he lives with his wife, Erica, and two children. He supervises 30 joint military and civilian network controllers in the operational direction of the $2.4 billion European Global Information Grid.

•Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class David A. Rosales, who is based in his homeport in Naval Support Activity, Bahrain, and serves on the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Monomoy. He plays an instrumental role in the launch and recovery of small boats, mooring and a host of other operations. He has volunteered to serve an additional six months in the North Arabian Gulf.

•Coast Guard Seaman Rayford B. Mitchell, who serves aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Diligence based out of Wilmington, N.C., and deployed to the western Caribbean Sea. Mitchell, a native of Columbia, S.C., works with the deck department, where he does hull and exterior maintenance and is also responsible for the cleanliness and general condition of the ship.

    Bush makes Christmas Eve calls to troops, UT, 24.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-24-bush-troops_x.htm

Christmas on the front line

    Christmas on the front line, IoS, 24.12.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2099975.ece

Christmas past on the front line

Makeshift dinners in the trenches, a piper sent out to face the enemy armed only with bagpipes, and a surprise feast in the jungle.
Some of the most heart-warming Christmases are in war. David Randall reports

Published: 24 December 2006
The Independent on Sunday

Today, the final window of an advent calendar will be opened by a young man's finger that, yesterday, pulled the trigger of a rifle. The calendar, with its prettily incongruous pictures of angels and snowmen and sugar-plum fairies, will be taped to a makeshift locker beside a bed which sits in a tent pitched somewhere in Basra, Kandahar or Kabul. Peace on Earth actually means something in such dangerous places

Christmas on the frontline seems at once so meaningful, and yet so far away; which is why those back home always make such special efforts to reach out to those serving there. On Christmas Day 1914, at the instigation of Princess Mary, soldiers were given a brass box monogrammed with an "M". It contained cigarettes or pipes for smokers, sweets for abstainers, spices and sweets for Indian troops, and chocolate for nurses.

Some of the first recipients of those Princess Mary's boxes did not keep the treats to themselves. At several places along the line, they stepped from their trenches, as did their German enemy, and the smokes and sweets were shared and swapped in no man's land. Lieutenant E Hulse of the Scots Guards later wrote of how a number of Germans came over to greet the men who had been firing at them shortly before. "We sang everything from 'Good King Wenceslas' to the ordinary Tommy's songs, and ended up with 'Auld Lang Syne'. We all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussian, Wurtemburgers etc, joined in. It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematographic film I should have sworn that it was faked."

And John Wedderburn-Maxwell, an officer with the Royal Field Artillery, recalled: "We walked about for around half an hour in no-man's land. And then we shook hands, wished each other good luck, and one fellow said: 'Will you send this off to my girlfriend in Manchester?' I sent it when I got back."

That 1914 Christmas truce was never to be repeated. But its legend, and the determination of all but the most fatigued of frontline soldiers to cleave to some semblance of homely happiness, meant, at subsequent wartimes, the spirit of Christmas flickered in the unlikeliest of settings.

On the troopship Stratheden, a stunning Atlantic sunset lit up the pipes and drums of the Cameronians "Beating the Retreat" on Christmas Eve 1942, and then the ship sailed on in the blackout darkness. At a village in Tunis in 1943, as Private Charles Carnt of the Royal Army Service Corps later recalled: "Christmas Day came. When we spotted six chickens roaming around, we decided they weren't doing much for the war effort, so they were rounded up and dealt with - plucked, gutted and in the cook house in under an hour." In Italy, Christmas 1944, Captain (later Lt-Col) Brian Clark MC sent one of his Irish Brigade pipers out to play in the snow. German paratroops opposite applauded and sang "Stille Nacht" in return. And in Korea in 1952, British troops lit fires with the propaganda Christmas cards the Korean People's Army had dropped behind their lines.

Even troops in captivity could squeeze some cheer from the day. At a Japanese prisoner of war camp which held Alfred Baker and his comrades, the commandant allowed the troops some cigarettes and even a little medicine, and missionaries sent over a horse's head for their dinner. It is a measure of conditions in the camp that the men were grateful. And, in Stalag Luft VI, "Jack" Oldfield, later a policeman in Doncaster, remembered that "after a month of skimping and scraping and almost literally starving", enough food had been secreted for a day of, by POW standards, feasting. "Tins were opened and our Christmas pud (made from crusts of black bread) was put on the stove... What a meal: four ounces of bacon, two and a half of Spam, a little scrambled egg, potatoes and swede... Then came the pud." Then the cake, with a frill made from toilet paper.

And warmth in modern times, too. In Bosnia, 1992, the Cheshires brought presents and chocolate to children at an orphanage on Christmas Day. There was football, children clambering over the tanks with the soldiers' blue United Nations berets on their little heads, piggyback rides and a lot of laughter. As they left, Emira Tatarevic, who worked at the orphanage, said: "We would like all of you as staff because you make the children so happy."

A year later, the colonel of the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards played Cinderella's wicked stepmother in a show in their bunker-like mess in former Yugoslavia. In Kabul 2001, back in the days when the "war on terror" seemed so straightforward, British and American soldiers fashioned a Christmas tree out of green mosquito netting.

But not all who enjoyed previous Christmases in Iraq and Afghanistan will be there for this one. Men, for instance, such as Craig O'Donnell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, killed by a Taliban suicide bomb in Kabul in September. When he died, his girlfriend was expecting their baby. The child is due at Christmas: such symbolism, even in a season as laden with it as this one.

The Western Front, 1916

Christmas dinner for the men was:

"Soup; roast meat with potato, carrot, turnip and onion; plum pudding; an apple or orange, and nuts. The sergeants had whisky, port and cigars."

Dinner for the officers was: "Paté de foie gras, julienne, curried prawns, roast goose, potato and cauliflower, plum pudding, anchovy on toast, dessert; Veuve Clicquot, port, cognac, Benedictine; coffee."

Taken from 'The War the Infantry Knew: 1914-19' by Captain JC Dunn

A hospital in France, 1917

The men had a wonderful Christmas Day. They were like a happy lot of children. We decorated the wards with flags, holly, mistletoe and paper flowers that the men made, and a tree in each ward.

You cannot imagine how pretty they were. Each patient began the day with a sock that was hung at the foot of their bed by the night nurses.

In each was an orange, a small bag of sweets, nuts and raisins, a handkerchief, pencil, tooth brush, pocket comb and a small toy that pleased them almost more than anything else, and which they at once passed on to their children.

They had a fine dinner: jam, stewed rabbit, peas, plum pudding, fruit, nuts, raisins and sweets. The plum puddings were sent by the sister of one of the nurses.

Nurse Agnes Warner, a Canadian girl caring for the wounded in France, 1 January 1917

The Middle East, 1943

My Dearest Mummy... On the 23rd, the 104th held a dinner, the idea being to give the cooks Xmas Day off... We had assembled a certain amount of beer by means of great self-sacrifice over a long period and also by raiding other units' Naafis. After a snifter or two, we adjourned to the mess and sat down to be served by the sergeants and officers, turkey, chicken, sausages, pork, spuds, cauliflower, pudding, mince pies, oranges and, of course, unlimited beer. Following a sing-song, there was a mild riot during which I was given a shampoo with a couple of oranges. We collected our party and went back to the tent where we waded into the rest of the drinks and began singing, mainly, if I remember right, a dirge about robins. We were a sorry sight at reveille next morning.

DVR I/C Bill Appleyard, Middlesex Yomanry, attached to 104th Regiment RHA in the Middle East, 2nd January 1943

Dimapur, India, 1943

It was Christmas Day 1943, and the Gurkhas, ever resourceful, went out and shot some deer - jungle deer - the day before and cooked it over open fires. Smoked it. And they gave it all to the British troops as a Christmas present. It was lovely. I never tasted anything like it. Smoked venison, a bit of a change from bully beef and biscuits, and we managed to get a few bottles of beer from the Naafi. So that was our Christmas dinner - and it was most acceptable.

Peter Roylance Noakes, officer with 1st Battalion, Northamptonshire Regiment, recalling his time in the jungle at Dimapur

    Christmas past on the front line, IoS, 24.12.2006,
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2099977.ece

Deck the halls with boughs of holly - before it dies out

Sunday December 24, 2006
The Observer
Robin McKie, science editor

One of the crowning glories of the festive season - holly trees groaning with clusters of crimson berries - is being destroyed by a combined assault from car exhausts and global warming.

Researchers have found that high levels of ozone during Britain's increasingly hot summers are causing holly trees to lose their leaves in winter and suffer stunted growth. The twin assault is also weakening their ability to withstand cold.

'It is a double whammy,' said Dr Jonathan Ranford, of Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent. 'The holly trees not only lose leaves after being affected by ozone, they are then unable to replace those leaves when the growing season starts up again.'

Ozone is produced when strong sunlight breaks up oxides of nitrogen that are released by car exhausts. Scientists have warned that the problem is likely to become more and more severe as global warming intensifies. One effect will be to increase cases of breathing problems among asthmatics and the elderly. However, it has also been found that the problem is now affecting many other facets of life in Britain.

In the case of holly, the threat is outlined in a paper by Ranford and his colleague, Kevin Reiling, in the current issue of Environmental Pollution. In their experiments, the pair used sealed chambers in which they grew young holly trees under a variety of atmospheric conditions. In particular, they altered amounts of ozone in the air so that they reached the 70 parts per billion level that has been typical of the intense summers experienced in Europe in recent years.

Then the pair took these saplings and planted them in open ground where they compared the trees' growth with that of normal holly saplings. Ranford and Reiling found the ozone-polluted trees grew 40 per cent fewer leaves in the experiment's first year compared with the normal holly saplings. Intriguingly, in the second year, they found there was still a significant knock-on effect, with leaf numbers down by about 30 per cent. Leaves, using sunlight, turn carbon dioxide into sugars. Without a full complement of leaves, a plant becomes stunted.

'It is possible that ozone-resistant strains of holly trees will evolve as climate conditions change,' said Ranford. 'On the other hand, we may find we have much less holly to go around in winter.'

The effect of global warming, in combination with other forms of pollution, is also illustrated by several other recent studies on British flora and fauna. Last week the Marine Biology Association reported that seashore creatures, including barnacles, snails and limpets, were being pushed north in search of cooler areas of coast. Affected species include toothed and flat topshells, acorn barnacles, China limpets and small periwinkles while some, such as the tortoiseshell limpet, have almost disappeared from Britain's shores.

At the same time, researchers at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, have found that nitrogen pollution - from fertilisers and other sources - has been helping common grasses to replace and kill off the moss that covers most of the Cairngorm plateau, an effect that is now being intensified by global warming. Numbers of dotterels which feed on moss have fallen alarmingly as a result.

Similarly, buff-tailed bumblebees which are not normally seen until spring have been spotted both in Nottingham and in York, while the red admiral butterfly and the common darter dragonfly, which are normally expected to be absent from our gardens during the winter, have been seen in several counties.

A long and prickly history

Druids revered holly as a sacred plant and wore sprigs of it in their hair while watching priests cut the mistletoe. The Romans attributed the creation of holly to the god Saturn and gave each other boughs of it during the raucous Saturnalia festival. Early Christians decked their homes with 'Saturn' holly to avoid persecution, and it stuck as a symbol of Christmas.

In Christian folklore the prickly leaves of holly became associated with Jesus's crown of thorns, while their berries represented the drops of blood shed for humanity's salvation. One of the most popular Christmas carols begins: 'The holly and the ivy/When they are both full grown/Of all the trees that are in the wood/The holly bears the crown.'

Famous Hollys include Buddy Holly, the Fifties singer; Holly Hunter, the film actress; Holly Golightly, the character played by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Hollywood, which according to popular myth got its name from imported English holly growing in the area.

There are about 400 species of holly trees and shrubs, growing in all continents except for Australasia and Antarctica. Their heights range from 6ins to 70ft.

Holly berries are eaten by birds, but are harmful to humans, although holly leaves have been used by herbalists to treat fevers and smallpox.

David Smith

    Deck the halls with boughs of holly - before it dies out, O, 24.12.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1978469,00.html


 

In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured," she says.

Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. "It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on," she says. She was already nervous about the birth - her first, and twins - so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't understand."

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

"Now Mariam is at an age when she asks me where her brother is," Fadia says. "She wants to know what happened to him. But how do I explain it?" She looks down. "Sometimes at night I scream and scream." In the years since, she has been pregnant four times, but she keeps miscarrying. "I couldn't bear to make another baby. I was convinced the same thing would happen to me again," she explains. "When I see the [Israeli] soldiers I keep thinking - what did my baby do to Israel?"

Since Fadia's delivery, in 2002, the United Nations confirms that a total of 36 babies have died because their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli checkpoints. All across Bethlehem - all across the West Bank - there are women whose pregnancies are being disturbed, or worse, by the military occupation of their land.

In Salfit, on the other side of the West Bank, Jamilla Alahad Naim, 29, is waiting for the first medical check-up of her five-month pregnancy. "I am frightened all the time," she says. "I am frightened for my baby because I have had very little medical treatment and I cannot afford good food ... I know I will give birth at home with no help, like I did with Mohammed [her last child]. I am too frightened to go to hospital because there are two checkpoints between our home [and there] and I know if you are detained by the soldiers, the mother or the baby can die out there in the cold. But giving birth at home is very dangerous too."

Hindia Abu Nabah - a steely 31-year-old staff nurse at Al Zawya Clinic, in Salfit district - says it is "a nightmare" to be pregnant in the West Bank today. "Recently, two of our pregnant patients here were tear-gassed in their homes ... The women couldn't breathe and went into premature labour. By the time we got there, the babies had been delivered stillborn."

Many of the medical problems afflicting pregnant women here are more mundane than Jamilla's darkest fears: 30 per cent of pregnant Palestinians suffer from anaemia, a lack of red blood cells. The extreme poverty caused by the siege and now the international boycott seems to be a key factor. The doctors here warn grimly that as ordinary Palestinians' income evaporates, they eat more staples and fewer proteins - a recipe for anaemia. There is some evidence, they add, that women are giving the best food to their husbands and children, and subsisting on gristle and scraps. The anaemia leaves women at increased risk of bleeding heavily and contracting an infection during childbirth.

Earlier this year, conditions for pregnant women on the West Bank - already poor - fell off a cliff. Following the election of Hamas, the world choked off funding for the Palestinian Authority, which suddenly found itself unable to pay its doctors and nurses. After several months medical staff went on strike, refusing to take anything but emergency cases. For more than three months, the maternity wards of the West Bank were empty and echoing. Beds lay, perfectly made, waiting for patients who could not come.

In all this time, there were no vitamins handed out, no ultrasound scans, no detection of congenital abnormalities. Imagine that the NHS had simply packed up and stopped one day and did not reopen for 12 weeks, and you get a sense of the scale of the medical disaster.

Some women were wealthy enough to go to the few private hospitals scattered across the West Bank. Most were not. So because of the international boycott of the Palestinians, every hospital warns there has been an unseen, unreported increase in home births on the West Bank.

I found Dr Hamdan Hamdan, the head of maternity services at Hussein Hospital, Bethlehem, pacing around an empty ward, chain-smoking. "This ward is usually full," he said. "The women who should be in this hospital - what is happening to them?"

They have been giving birth in startlingly similar conditions to those suffered by Mary 2,000 years ago. They have delivered their babies with no doctors, no sterilised equipment, no back-up if there are complications. They have been boycotted back into the Stone Age. The strike ended this month after the PA raised funds from Muslim countries - but the effects of stopping maternity services are only now becoming clear. Hindia Abu Nabah says: "There is a clear link between the deteriorating health situation and the international boycott.

Amid this horror, one charity has been supporting pregnant Palestinian women even as their medical services fell apart.

Merlin - one of the three charities being supported by the Independent Christmas Appeal - has set up two mobile teams, with a full-time gynaecologist and a paediatrician, to take medical services to the parts of the West Bank cut off by the Israeli occupation. They provide lab technicians and ultrasound machines - the fruits of the 21st century.

I travelled with the team to the Salfit region - scarred by Israeli settlements pumping out raw sewage on to Palestinian land - to see women and children desperately congregating around them seeking help. Amid the dozens of nervous women and swarms of sickly children, Rahme Jima, 29, is sitting with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She is in the last month of her pregnancy, and this is the first time she has seen a doctor since she conceived.

"The nearest hospital is in Nablus, and we can't afford to pay for the transport to get there through all the checkpoints," she says, revealing she is planning - in despair - to give birth at home. Even if she had the cash, she says she is "too frightened of being detained at the checkpoint and being forced to give birth there". She sighs, and adds: "I will be so relieved to finally be seen by a doctor, I have been so worried." But when she returns from seeing the doctor, she says: "I have anaemia, and they have given me iron supplements," supplied by Merlin. She can't afford to eat well; she lives with her husband and four children in a room in her mother-in-law's house, and her husband, Joseph, has been unemployed since his permit to move through the checkpoints expired. "The doctor says I should have been seen much earlier in my pregnancy. My baby will probably be born too small."

All the problems afflicting these 21st century Marys are paraded in Merlin's clinic. One terrified, terrorised mother after another presents herself to the specialists here, and leaves clutching packs of folic acid, calcium, iron and medicine. Dr Bassam Said Nadi, the senior medical officer for this area, says: "I thank Merlin for the specialist care they have brought. Not long ago, we didn't even have petrol in our cars. Alongside other organisations, they are helping us survive this terrible period in our country's history."

Merlin can only maintain these mobile clinics with your help. Leaning in the doorway of her bare clinic, Hindia Abu Nabah says: "Tell your readers that we need their help. There are no Hamas or Fatah foetuses. They don't deserve to be punished. I couldn't stand to look another anaemic woman in the eye and tell her that her baby will be underweight or malformed and we don't have iron supplements to give her. I can't go back to that. I can't."

    Independent Appeal: 'What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?', I, 23.12.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/appeals/indy_appeal/article2097790.ece

Leading article:

The little town that symbolises

the suffering of the Middle East

Bethlehem tells us something revealing.
There is an exodus of the people responsible for what little prosperity there was

Published: 23 December 2006
The Independent

In one of the unfailing ironies of the place religious believers call the Holy Land, its most famous emblem of peace - the little town of Bethlehem - is once again a symbol of its troubles. Its economy is in crisis. Concerns over security are keeping many tourists away. Israel's security wall has cut the town off from much of its agricultural hinterland. Unemployment stands at 65 per cent. The West's financial boycott against the Palestinian Authority has meant no salaries have been paid at the municipality for four months.

It is a complex business. The wall reflects legitimate Israeli security concerns; half the suicide bombers in 2004 are said to have come from Bethlehem. And, although Israel ceased its military activity in the Gaza Strip a month ago, Palestinian militants continue to launch rockets against Israel from there. On the other side, the recent escalation of internecine strife between the Palestinian factions has added to the tensions which have been building since voters ousted the corrupt Fatah leadership and replaced it with the more militant Hamas. Yesterday fierce gun battles raged between the two groups; some predicted all-out civil war.

But Bethlehem tells us something revealing. The Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, who arrived there on a Christmas pilgrimage earlier this week, have expressed concern - not just at the barrier which is "strangling" the place, but also at the flight of Christians from the town. Christians constituted more than 85 per cent of the population in 1948; today they make up just 12 per cent. This matters because it is the Christians who own most of the town's hotels, restaurants and shops. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza there is an exodus of the middle classes responsible for what little prosperity there was.

Prosperity for Palestinians holds the key to peace. A meeting is urgently needed between President Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. They have a lot to discuss. High on the agenda must be the rocket attacks on Israel and the Israeli incursions into the Palestinian territories. They must also make progress on the release of Palestinian prisoners, in which they would be assisted by Hamas freeing the Israeli soldier they captured last June. To do so would be an important signal from Hamas that it intends to continue to move along the path of political realism it adopted by contesting the elections in the first place. But their guiding strategy must be to give the Palestinians the prospect of prosperity. Mr Olmert needs to look beyond short-term security considerations and ease those Israeli restrictions that are hampering the organic growth of the Palestinian economy. A new horizon of prosperity, even more than symbolic political gestures, is essential to dispelling the sense of despair that grips so many Palestinian youths.

Shifts are needed internationally too. The recent Baker-Hamilton plan called for movement in US policy on the Israeli/Palestinian problem. President Bush needs to heed that. And the European Union, which has salved its conscience in the past by giving more aid to charities working with Palestinians, needs to get off the fence and apply some political pressure to Israel.

In the midst of it all, the innocents - terrified children, disabled people, women cut off from hospitals by security checkpoints - continue to suffer. Two of the three charities for which we are raising money in our Christmas appeal this year work with such people. Supporting them is the only gesture of solidarity open to most of us. We exhort our readers to be generous in their giving. In the end, though, personal hopes must be allied to politics. If there is anything good in the present flux it is that it offers a chance to find new ways forward.

    Leading article: The little town that symbolises the suffering of the Middle East, I, 23.12.2006, http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2097757.ece

Pope Worries About Clash With Islam

    Pope Worries About Clash With Islam, NYT, 22.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Vatican-Pope.html

2.15pm

Santa dies at children's party

Friday December 22, 2006
Press Association
Guardian Unlimited

Children watched in horror as a Santa Claus collapsed and died as he handed out presents at a Christmas party on Sunday.

Andrew Robertson was taken ill as the excited youngsters received their gifts. The 82-year-old was taken to a side room and attempts made to revive him, but he was pronounced dead when medics arrived.

Mr Robertson, from Dundee, had played Santa at the city's Broughty Castle bowling club Christmas party, held for the grandchildren of members, for several years.

"Andy was a father figure in the club who never had a bad word to say about anyone," Ian Smart, the bowling club's secretary, said. "If you asked him to do anything for you, he would always say 'no problem'.

"One wee kid said 'how are we going to get our presents next week if Father Christmas is ill?' - they didn't understand what had happened."

Mr Smart said Mr Robertson, who had played an active role in the club, was "well liked and will be sorely missed".

Mr Robertson's brother, Alister, said he had complained about feeling hot shortly before collapsing.

"The kids saw him getting taken away," he told the Courier newspaper. "They knew something was wrong with Santa Claus as he went away with the two guys, but they didn't see anything further.

"It has been quite a shock for everybody, but my view is that he was there thoroughly enjoying himself when he was struck down."

    Santa dies at children's party, G, 22.12.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2006/story/0,,1977823,00.html

Homelessness catches families even amid affluence

Updated 12/22/2006 10:51 AM ET
USA Today
By Wendy Koch

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — Christine Fuller finds holiday kindness at unexpected moments, such as before sunrise at a bus stop 7 miles from the White House.

A bus driver sees her switching buses each weekday morning at 6:15 with four neatly dressed children, ages 6 to 10, as she escorts them to a before-school program. The driver lauds their behavior and says he wants to give each child a Christmas present.

Fuller doesn't know his name. He doesn't know hers. She says presents would be fine.

The bus driver also doesn't know that Fuller and her children are homeless. They've been living at a shelter since September. Fuller has a full-time job that pays her $23,000 a year but says she can't afford an apartment in this affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where a typical two-bedroom apartment rents for $1,225 a month.

The problem of poverty and homelessness — and how difficult it is to escape — is poignantly illustrated in the hit movie The Pursuit of Happyness, which stars Will Smith and his son, Jaden.

At least 2 million Americans, many of whom have jobs and families, are homeless at some point over the course of a year, says Philip Mangano, executive director of the White House's Interagency Council on Homelessness.

"It's very traumatic for children," Mangano says.

It can be particularly so in a place like Falls Church and surrounding Fairfax County, one of the nation's wealthiest areas with a median household income of $94,600.

Fuller, 32, tries to ward off any trauma by focusing on routines and maintaining dignity in tough circumstances.

Her day starts at 3:45 a.m., in the two-bedroom, 300-square-foot unit her family occupies at Shelter House, a county facility that can house seven families.

Fuller gets ready for her job as a dispatch assistant at a courier service, then at 5 a.m. wakes her boys, William, 10, and Isaiah, 7. After she gets them going, she rouses the girls, Beatrice, 8, and Jhavona, 6.

"Mom, our life is so boring," she says the kids tell her. "You sound like a drill sergeant."

They're out the door by 5:45 a.m. with a snack in hand to catch the first public bus. They switch buses before arriving at a before-school program that opens at 6:30 a.m. The kids have subsidized breakfast and lunch at school.

"My 7-year-old knows every bus route," says Fuller, sitting on a vinyl couch in her unit's small living area.

After dropping off the kids, she boards another bus to get to her job, which she has held for three years, by 7:30 a.m. She works until 5 p.m. and then takes a bus to pick up her kids at an after-school program. She pays $177 monthly for the child care. The unsubsidized cost for four kids in similar programs in Fairfax County is $1,500.

Being homeless during the holidays can be particularly grim, but this month Fuller and her children have received several gifts from charitable residents, from dolls to firetrucks to a microwave oven. Such gifts reflect both the generosity of individuals and the same community wealth that has hindered Fuller's ability to find her own place to live.

"Apartments cost a lot here," says Fuller, a never-married high school dropout who has six children in all. The two oldest — a 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl — live with a family friend in a nearby town and are in their high school's marching band.

Fuller says she can't move to a more affordable city or distant suburb because her job is near downtown Washington and she has no car. Despite the difficulty of living in such an expensive area, she's also reluctant to go elsewhere because she grew up here, and her mother and grandparents live nearby.

Fuller receives child support from the father of one of her children. She doesn't know where one of the fathers is, and another helps out with child care on weekends. But when it comes to finances, she's largely on her own.

Families without homes

Families with children make up about 40% of the nation's homeless people, according to a USA TODAY analysis of government data. Those in homeless families represent about 55% of the roughly 2,000 homeless people in Fairfax, which has about 1 million residents.

More than half the single homeless adults in Fairfax are white, while 65% of those in homeless families are African-American, according to a county report released this month.

Two of every five homeless adults in Fairfax works, says Gerry Connolly, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors. "A lot of people benefit from our vibrant economy, but others are cut out," he says. He cites the loss of hundreds of affordable housing units during the recent real estate boom.

"When you meet the (homeless) children, your heart breaks," Connolly says, "because they haven't done anything to deserve it."

He says Fairfax, like many jurisdictions across the nation, has stepped up efforts to find more places for the homeless to stay, either through their friends and relatives or churches, motels and shelters. It doesn't always work. He says some people live in their cars.

"We've even had people living in the woods under tarps," he says.

For most of her life, Fuller lived with her grandparents in a three-bedroom house in nearby Arlington County. When the grandparents moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Arlington, officials said it was too small for Fuller and her children to also live there, so she spent six months in a shelter. She moved into a three-bedroom basement apartment in Fairfax County, but officials there deemed it a fire hazard.

Fuller and her four youngest children then spent three months in a motel room paid for by Fairfax County before a unit became available at Shelter House.

"We're helping the working homeless," shelter director Joe Meyer says.

The children "know this isn't their own place," Fuller says. They can't invite kids over for play dates or birthday parties. She adds that like many youths who struggle to cope with the trauma of being homeless, her children have suffered from mood swings, depression and other problems.

"I know I have to better myself for my kids," she says. She tells her kids to "stay in school, … stay out of jail, stay out of trouble."

Fuller says when she sees her 14-year-old daughter, she warns her: "Don't make the mistakes I made" by, among other things, getting pregnant while in high school.

At Shelter House, government workers make sure homeless families get food stamps as well as benefits from Medicaid and mental health and social services agencies. Parents such as Fuller must attend evening workshops on parenting, alcohol and drug awareness, financial planning and job-seeking skills.

Families are expected to stay no more than three months, but they can stay longer if they have no other housing options and make progress toward self-sufficiency, Meyer says. He says Fuller's family will be able to stay until she can get a subsidized apartment.

"They've been a great help," Fuller says. She initially chafed at the shelter's 10 p.m. curfew and visitor restrictions, but says she's learning to manage money better and pay off $5,000 in credit card debt.

Fuller says she's not buying Christmas toys for her children, only necessities. Sometimes they tease her, calling her "the Grinch."

Fairfax board Chairman Connolly's concern about the impact of homelessness on families is reflected in the waiting list for the 32 units the county has available at Shelter House and two other facilities. The list is approaching 90 families.

A report released last week by the U.S. Conference of Mayors that analyzed homelessness in 23 cities said that in most of the cities, some homeless families have to split up in order to find shelter.

"This is just unacceptable," says Trenton, N.J., Mayor Douglas Palmer, the conference's president.

The Conference of Mayors report says requests for shelter rose 9% last year in the 23 cities surveyed.

Housing affordability is the top problem, says Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor of social welfare policy. He says the government needs to use tax credits to push more investors and developers to build affordable apartments. He says it's much cheaper to give a housing subsidy to a homeless family than to put the family in a shelter, which can cost $50,000 for a 14-month stay.

Mangano says federal spending on housing subsidies has risen in recent years, but the number of available units hasn't increased because of rising real estate prices.

Adding holiday cheer

While communities struggle to find solutions for homelessness, people such as Ginger Mahon are helping make the lives of homeless families a little better this time of the year by playing Santa.

Mahon, a PTA president in Great Falls, Va., a half-hour drive from Shelter House, asked her neighbors to "adopt" a homeless family for Christmas. She asked several shelters for wish lists of items that homeless people wanted and matched them with donors.

The Fullers are receiving not only a microwave but also an air hockey table, a $100 Target gift card, a blanket, pots, pans and dinnerware. Other families at the shelter are getting presents, including hundreds of dollars in gift cards.

"During the holidays, the community really reaches out," says Meyer, the shelter's director. He says people wanted to donate iPods last year, but he reminded them that shelter residents don't have computers to download songs.

On Thursday, Ted Smith, the bus driver who sees Fuller and her children each weekday, gave the kids huge bags of toys that he and his wife had bought. "You do good in school and thank the Lord for all you have," he told the youngsters.

Fuller says Beatrice and Jhavona had wanted dolls, and Isaiah asked for firetrucks. William wanted a Sony PlayStation 3, which costs at least $600, but he knew his mom couldn't afford it.

Fuller says William told her: "All I really want for Christmas is our own place."

    Homelessness catches families even amid affluence, UT, 22.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-21-homelessness-cover_x.htm

Those Inflatable Santas: Eyepoppers to Eyesores

December 22, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

HOLTSVILLE, N.Y., Dec. 19 — On a recent quiet afternoon, with few witnesses around, Homer Simpson, Santa Claus and a penguin perched on an igloo suddenly appeared here on the Long Island landscape as if from nowhere, unfolding slowly like Frankenstein monsters lurching to life on the table. As Homer’s extremities reached full size, his pink nylon fist puffed into Mr. Snow Man’s face — an involuntary attack, to be sure. Bop.

Such is the phantasmagoric, Disney-esque experience of the new Christmas custom sweeping the suburbs.

Whatever else Christmas in America means — the birth of Jesus, holly wreaths, the Chipmunks, cultural tension — it now also includes these gargantuan, inflatable outdoor decorations, called “Airblowns” by their chief manufacturer.

They have been around for a while, but mark 2006 as the year these decorations became a full-blown fixture in the pantheon of holiday traditions — and, as is the holiday tradition, the subject of a rift.

Not quite a culture war. Call it an intramural disagreement among the Christmas crazed.

“Appalling,” Catherine Bruckner, a traditionalist who decorates only in holly and evergreen, sneered as she stopped her car in front of an inflated Santa playing poker with two shrewd-eyed reindeer in a menagerie totaling two dozen figures. “It’s bad enough to see those things on Halloween. At Christmas, they rise to a level of tackiness that is horrible.”

For the purists, the old-fashioned stuff is still out there: the strings of lights along the gutters, the lighted tin soldiers, crèches. The homemade wooden Rudolph with blinking red nose, hauled out of storage every Christmas for 45 years and put up on Frank and Diana Culmones’s roof in Franklin Square.

But the inflatables have brought the notion of Christmas self-expression to another plane. Now, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that televised triumphal march that inaugurates the season, can live on in miniature for weeks at a time, swaying and bobble-heading across the front lawn of anyone willing to pay the electric bill — maybe a thousand dollars if you keep them inflated all the time, less if you leave the skins of your Christmas characters sprawled on the ground most of the day, their crumpled faces staring blankly at the sky or the sod, depending.

Some people do not like — inflated, deflated — the whole thing.

“The children must enjoy it, but we were noticing how when they’re deflated, these things look like trash,” Robert Rickert, a friend of the appalled Mrs. Bruckner, said as he stepped from the car to snap a picture. “Or dead bodies,” Mrs. Bruckner added.

Old-school enthusiasts like the Culmones and their son Christopher, who spend weeks hanging 10,000 lights, have no patience for anything that advertises itself, more or less, as a big Christmas bang for the too-busy-to-bother set.

“We just wouldn’t have those things,” said Mrs. Culmone, whose house with the Rudolph on the roof is also adorned with a homemade replica of Rockefeller Center: the Rock, the tree, the ice skaters, the works. “The plastic. It’s not homey.”

The inflatables sell off the shelf for $69 to $300, and Gemmy Industries Corporation of Coppell, Tex., which claims to produce the majority of the large figures sighted this year on lawns, porches, terraces and roofs from Long Island to Los Angeles, is not shy about the product’s corner-cutting appeal.

“The magic of the Airblown is that you buy it, plug it in, and it’s ready to go,” said Sharlene Jenner, the marketing manager for Gemmy, a company that first made its mark six years ago with a wall-mounted singing fish known as Big Mouth Billy Bass, and began making Christmas floats soon after. “You’re going to make a big statement without 20 hours of work. It’s a lot of decoration for the dollar, in other words.”

Ms. Jenner refused to reveal specifics, but said that this year’s sales were “very strong.” The company also sells inflatable turkeys, pumpkins and the occasional dreidel.

A spokeswoman for Home Depot said its stores doubled the number of inflatable Christmas items offered this year to 18 from last year. Bob Davidson, vice president for merchandising of Brandsonsale.com, an online retailer in California, said sales of inflatables had tripled since his first sales four years ago, adding, “We’re bringing them in by the containerload.”

Is the divide between inflaters and noninflaters as big a deal as the one between, say, some outspoken Christians and the people they consider to be engaged in a “war on Christmas?”

There are no studies on the matter to date, but the answer seems to be, probably, no. There is too much intermarriage among the camps.

Anthony and Lena Colagrande of Baldwin Harbor, N.Y., for example, already had the big glass case outside with the dancing Christmas figurines, and the tin soldiers, candy canes and angels when they bought their first inflatable, a six-foot polar bear, a few years ago. They now have 25 inflatables of all kinds.

“Every year, I just buy more and more stuff,” said Mr. Colagrande, a home builder. “People started coming to look at what we had, and after a while it was like they expected it, and you can’t let them down.”

A grand tour of some of Long Island’s most ambitious Christmas displays suggests that the inflatable decorations are scarce in lower-income neighborhoods, but they are also rare in pricier places, where the culture of understatement seems to rule: white lights twined with fresh evergreen sprigs, etc.

There is something of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Wemmick in the bigger displays. He is that dour clerk in “Great Expectations” who turns out to be so kindly when entertaining Pip at his cottage, which is a sort of fortress of cozy curiosities and extravagantly rigged Rube Goldberg-ianisms contrived for the amusement of his father, the Aged P. You can hear Mr. Wemmick’s line: “My own doing. Looks pretty; don’t it?” in the pride of almost any homeowner whose display stands out from a few blocks off.

Homeowners like Ron Meoni, 52, the impresario of the tableau of 22 inflatable ornaments here in Holtsville where Homer slugged the snowman.

“You want to see that again?” Mr. Meoni, a carpenter asked an intrigued passer-by.

He cut the power, and as Homer and Santa and the others melted to the ground, and the absence of the thrum of their motors made the air seem especially still, there was no doubt about it: a theatrical moment was poised somewhere in the air above the crumpled plastic.

Mr. Meoni stood at the switch in the doorway of his garage.

“Ready?” he asked.

    Those Inflatable Santas: Eyepoppers to Eyesores, NYT, 22.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/nyregion/22inflate.html?hp&ex=1166850000&en=ac5e9d5d24da22ee&ei=5094&partner=homepage

S.C. mom has son arrested

for playing with present before Christmas

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A fed-up mother had her 12-year-old son arrested for allegedly rummaging through his great-grandmother's things and playing with his Christmas present early.

The mother called police Sunday after learning her son had disobeyed orders and repeatedly taken a Game Boy from its hiding place at his great-grandmother's house next door and played it. He was arrested on petty larceny charges, taken to the police station in handcuffs and held until his mother picked him up after church.

"My grandmother went out of her way to lay away a toy and paid on this thing for months," said the boy's mother, Brandi Ervin. "It was only to teach my son a lesson. He's been going through life doing things ... and getting away with it."

Police did not release the boy's name.

The mother said that her son was found in the last year to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but that his medicine does not seem to help.

She said he faces an expulsion hearing at his school Wednesday. Rock Hill Police Capt. Mark Bollinger said the boy took a swing at a police officer assigned to the school last month. He has been suspended from school since then.

The boy's case will be presented to Department of Juvenile Justice officials in York County, who will decide what happens to him, Bollinger said. His mother hopes he can attend a program that will finally scare him straight.

"It's not even about the Christmas present," she said. "I only want positive things out of it. ... There's no need for him to act this way. I'd rather call myself than someone else call for him doing something worse than this."

    S.C. mom has son arrested for playing with present before Christmas, UT, 6.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-05-christmas-arrest_x.htm

12 questions of Christmas

    12 questions of Christmas, I, 25.12.2005, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article335011.ece

Ideas & Trends

    Ghosts of a Christmas Past, in Plastic and Tinsel, NYT, 25.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/weekinreview/25barr.html?hp

Vicar tells children 'Santa is dead'

10 December 2002
Ananova

A vicar has apologised for telling children at a Christmas carol service that Santa Claus was dead.

He also told the congregation at St Mary's Church in Maidenhead it was impossible for so many presents to be delivered in such a short space of time.

The Reverend Lee Rayfield, of nearby St Peter's Church, has now admitted he made a terrible mistake.

He based his sermon on joke scientific research from the internet and says it was meant as a bit of fun for older children who already knew Santa did not exist.

He added: "I made a serious misjudgment of the ages of the children. I did not realise how young some of them were and I am sitting here now wondering how I managed not to realise.

"Even when I was there, I did not twig. I am mortified and appreciate I have put some parents in a difficult position with a lot of explaining to do. I love Christmas."

Mr Rayfield's comments came from a joke story that circulated on the internet earlier this year on how scientific research would dispel the myth of Santa.

It says Santa would have to deliver 378 million presents to 91.8 million homes in 31 hours. To do it, he and the reindeer would have to travel 3,000 times the speed of sound.

It says the reindeer would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second and Santa would be killed by 4,315,000 pounds worth of force.

Mr Rayfield is now writing a letter to parents apologising for the incident.

    Story filed: 11:39 Tuesday 10th December 2002, http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_725147.html

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