Whatever Happened to Christmas?
If you had asked me, when I was a child, what my favourite time of year was, "Christmas" would be the unequivocal answer. The name itself was imbued with magic. They very thought of Christmas would have me and my sibs literally jumping for joy. It would have been absolutely inconceivable to me at that time that society would one day virtually banish the very name of this most beloved holiday from the public square. But fifty years later, this is exactly where we are. Before I launch this rant...and it'll be a doozy, trust me...this isn't coming from a place of religiosity. As most everyone who knows me knows, I'm an avowed, even hardcore atheist. So it's not a lamentation about a "War on Christmas" from a religious perspective because indeed, much of Christmas is secular, even pagan in nature. The other thing is that this is not a trivial issue. It's emblematic of a larger problem...of a western world so driven by guilt over past tran