I have had heartbreaking set backs this year …. but this time of year
Christmas ,my wife ’s favorite time of year reminds me that hope still
lives ,that belief in things unseen is not crazy , is not naive. So to
all my fellow aspiring artist believe, believe in yourself in the
potential of greatness that is in all of us and try to live what this
time of year is truly all about Happy Holidays. God bless us one and
all.

I may be an atheist but I still celebrate, I could go around saying yule(tide) and that stuff but christmas is easier.  Regardless of what you celebrate I think there is something to be said of christmas/festive cheer.  Especially when the nights are so long, it's easy to feel depressed as a result.

Genejoke [..] wrote:
I may be an atheist but I still celebrate, ...  Regardless of what you celebrate I think there is something to be said of christmas/festive cheer.  Especially when the nights are so long, it's easy to feel depressed as a result.

Exactly.  Every year the musings of Dickens in A Christmas Carol mean so much more. 
 
And the whole Believe thing?  There's also the Miracle on 34th Street.  Macy*s and Christmas.

Genejoke [..] wrote:
I could go around saying yule(tide) and that stuff but christmas is easier.

  
It does sound a bit contrived to say yule in English, but in my native tongue we never stopped using that word. Yule, or "Jól" as we say it, has maintained its proper status as the official name of the holidays and we've hold onto allot of interesting old traditions that managed to stick around since the times when we celebrated winter solstice, rather than a birth of a savior.

This weekend I'm gonna go looking around downtown, with my camera. The city has set up some very clever and funny displays of some of our more colorful creatures from this season. I could post them somewhere on the forum, if you guys want.

At any rate. Good tidings to all and to all a good night.

There was one Christmas Eve when I came out of a midnight service, and a light snow was in progress, back lit by a full moon.  You could see your breath, and people were speaking quietly, as if they were in a library.
 
It was years later that I heard the phrase "betwixt and between".  That is the phrase that best describes that particular very early morning.   I remember the tingle of magic was almost palpable -- partly because I am always ready to welcome real magic, so it doesn't hide from me, and because - it was there.
 
So many things have been ascribed to this 25 December date that we call Christmas, even though many scholars have evidence that Jesus was born sometime during the summer.  But if you find joy in hope, then there will be joy at Christmas time, a day set aside to celebrate one whose life was spent trying to teach us about how to find joy with each other and, thereby, in an afterlife.  And that Christmas was assigned to a time of year, in the northern hemisphere, when night rules and much of nature sleeps, we should remember that it's during the deep sleep of night that we dream.