Happy Christmas to all and a merry money-spending sacreligeous experience.

I have to say, I do enjoy the holidays. I love Christmas, I enjoy the New Year's celebrations. I eat turkey and ham, many cakes and sweets of overly high calorie counts just like everyone else. I spend time with family and waste copious amounts of money on gifts for people that I can only hope they will find as useful as I thought they would be. But all along, I have something different. I think of it as a mixture of a religious practice and a cultural tradition. Christianity celebrates Christmas as the coming of the Christ child, and the beginning of the saving grace of God. Popular culture uses Christmas as a means to bring families together under the guise of spending money and exchanging gifts as a way to bond. I like both. So regardless of whether you follow the Christian belief (despite all the controversy over the actual time of the year that Jesus would have been born, and the moving of the celebration to coincide with the Pagan ritual of the Winter Solstice) or wether you choose to enjoy time with family and trading of debt between people. I don't really care. I wish everyone a happy holiday, and for the others (Hanukkah and Kwanzaa for instance, I have no experience practicing you, so I won't even begin to try to understand it.) I still wish you a happy holiday.