The poet W.H. Auden captured the after-Christmas feeling very well. Toward the close of his long poem, “For the Time Being,” he wrote: “Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.The holly and…

Have you ever noticed that when you get together with your family and start telling stories about when you were growing up or what happened years ago, the same events sound very different as different people tell the story? Depending on who’s describing it, the guy who used to live across the street was a…

Love Christmas. Love this Gospel. For this is John’s Christmas story. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say that this is John’s version of the Incarnation. No shepherds, no star, no kings, no Bethlehem, no manger, no Joseph and no Mary. Had John been Rogers and Hammerstein, he would have started his version of…

The familiar Christmas story that features angels and shepherds, a brilliant star and a silent night, Mary and Joseph in a stable, and the newborn child asleep on the hay – this is a story that captures the imagination. It is the source for countless carols and pageants, greeting cards and paintings, and nativity scenes….

[NOTE TO READER: The word Chuuk is pronounced to rhyme with “look.”] On the island of Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, there are many people who have come seeking a better life for their children. One of them is a man we’ll call Andrew. Andrew is from Chuuk State, a chain of islands surrounding…

“Fast away the old year passes.” So goes the last verse of the old Christmas carol, “Deck the Halls.” For Christians, our celebration of Christmas is but three days old. We have nine more days, and would that we could have all the world join in; some will, but for many, once the tree is…

I once watched a television program on the theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman. It was said that he had the finest mind since Einstein. He had worked on the Manhattan Project, taught at the California Institute of Technology, and as a final project, had served on the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster. The TV program…

Today we celebrate the first Sunday in the Octave of Christmas. Many of us see it as an anticlimax, a time of letdown after the Big Day, when we gather all the family and share all the gifts and eat all the food. Far too often, this is a day when “Sabbath” basically means that…

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we heard the wonderful story of Jesus’ birth from Luke’s Gospel-the account of a baby in a stable, of shepherds, and angels in the town of Bethlehem. This is the narrative from one of the four Gospel accounts, the four versions of the Good News of Jesus Christ. How…