As the years pass by, it can feel like Christmas has become less about the birth of Christ and his salvific mission and more about secularism and winter.

Look no farther than some of the most popular “Christmas” carols of the past 100 years: “White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Deck the Halls,” “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” and on and on.

This Christmas, as you gather with your family, return to the meaning of the holiday — the birth of Christ — by reflecting on the original French version of “O Holy Night.”

The closing lyrics proclaim, without equivocation, that it is Christ who has saved us and we celebrate his coming. In other words, Christ is King!

For those in the French-speaking world, and especially the Acadian and Quebecois diaspora in New England, “Minuit Chretien” was a staple entrance hymn of midnight Mass.

While the English version “O Holy Night” is a beautiful song, the lyrics were adapted by Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight, reducing the theological weight of the original French.

Here are those English lyrics.

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining;
it is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,
for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born!
O night divine! O night, O night divine!

According to Chicago Catholic, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the song quickly became popular in Northern U.S. abolitionist circles due mainly to its third verse, which deals with breaking the chains of slavery.

Truly He taught us to love one another.
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,
and in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we.
Let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! O praise His name forever!
His power and glory evermore proclaim!
His power and glory evermore proclaim!

Again, this is beautiful, but it downplays the truly salvific mission of Jesus Christ, God incarnate.

Before examining the French lyrics and their literal English translation, listen to the definitive version of the song, sung by Luciano Pavarotti at Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal, Quebec, in 1978. The concert in which he sang this rendition was a long-standing PBS Christmas special.

French lyrics

Here are the French lyrics, as compiled by the Oxford International Song Festival.

Minuit, Chrétiens, c’est l’heure solennelle,
Où l’homme Dieu descendit jusqu’à nous
Pour effacer la tache originelle
Et de son Père arrêter le courroux.
Le monde entier tressaille d’espérance
À cette nuit qui lui donne un sauveur.
Peuple, à genoux, attends ta délivrance.
Noël, Noël, voici le Rédempteur.

The tone is set right at the start. The verse boldly announces that this song is for believers. “Midnight, Christians, it is the holy hour.”

There is no mistaking this for secularism or a postmodern, easy Christianity. It calls the listener to remember that he is Christian and that Christmas is about the coming of the Savior, as the second line says, “When God as man descended unto us.”

The next part boldly proclaims the reason Christ became man: to save mankind from the stain of original sin. “To erase the original stain, and to end the wrath of His Father.”

The next two lines are very close to the English translation: “The whole world thrills with hope on this night that gives it a Savior.”

The end of the first verse brings it home: “Kneel, people, await your deliverance: Christmas, Christmas, the Redeemer is here!”

A bold declaration of what the night is about: the coming of deliverance that Christ the Redeemer brings!

The second and third verses are as reverent and hopeful as the first. The closing lyrics proclaim, without equivocation, that it is Christ who has saved us and we celebrate his coming. In other words: Christ is King!

​Christmas, Culture, Lifestyle, Music 

A Democratic politician from Rhode Island was caught on camera berating and arguing with police officers during a DUI traffic stop.

‘God forbid I was a black person, I’d be arrested!’

East Greenwich police pulled over Cranston Democratic Committee Chair Maria Bucci after midnight on Thursday.

Bucci, a former Cranston City Council member and former mayoral candidate, told authorities that she only had one glass of wine and was driving her cousin home from a Christmas party, according to the officer’s bodycam footage.

One of the officers claimed that he could smell alcohol on her breath and noted that her driving was “pretty erratic.”

Bucci accused the officer of abuse and claimed he was trying to embarrass her.

“You know who I am, right?” she asked.

“I don’t know who you are, miss,” the officer responded.

RELATED: Police video shows unhinged Democrat official melting down during arrest: ‘You’re gonna regret this!’

Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After several outbursts, Bucci reluctantly agreed to a field sobriety test. The officer asked Bucci to follow the tip of his pen with her eyes, then asked whether she would submit to a walk-and-turn test.

Bucci began arguing with the officers at the scene.

“I honestly feel bad. If I was a black human, I think you guys — no, honestly … I feel bad for the people that are not in my position,” she shouted while pointing at the officers.

Bucci shouted at her cousin, who remained in the vehicle to make some phone calls for her.

“Call my husband right now, and call the attorney general and everybody else in town,” Bucci said.

RELATED: The carnage no one talks about: Drunk driving and illegal aliens

Photo by MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images

“This is disgusting. God forbid I was a black person, I’d be arrested,” she continued.

“What are you going to do? Shoot me? … Arrest me?”

After Bucci continued to be argumentative and did not complete the walk-and-turn portion of the sobriety test, the officer instructed her to turn around so he could place her in handcuffs.

“Give me the camera,” Bucci said, as she leaned toward the officer’s body camera. “You’re a dick!”

Bucci received a misdemeanor DUI charge, the New York Post reported.

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​News, Maria bucci, Rhode island, East greenwich, Dui, Politics 

“What is a Christmas movie?”

This is probably a question you’ve heard before in passing. Most of us instinctively have a good idea of what one is, but more than likely, that understanding is rather inexplicable, abstract, or trapped in the minutiae.

Only by leaning into my Christian faith did I begin to see these films and the unique glow that turns a regular film into a Christmas film.

We all know the tropes of Christmas movies — Santa Claus, joy to the world, peace and goodwill toward men, white snow on a warm Christmas morning, jingle bells, presents under the tree, hot chocolate and eggnog, sugar plums, figgy pudding, Nativity scenes, et cetera.

For most people, Christmas is a feeling and an idea as much as it is a day on the calendar. However, trying to put the abstract into words is challenging. In my capacity as a film reviewer, amateur filmmaker, and member of the Music City Film Critics Association, I have spent more than three years talking with friends and puzzling over the question for fun. For the most part, this debate was a lively intellectual exercise between my philosopher and cinephile friends and me; I can recall one particularly fun session of debate with my girlfriend as we discussed the Aristotelian implications of the definition of Christmas movies.

As it will become clear in this text, though, the answer to the question, “What is a Christmas movie?” is surprisingly hard to narrow down and answer definitively.

This was a problem I set out to try to formally solve in late 2024, during a rare moment of adult life when I had the time to sit down for three months and binge-watch out-of-season Christmas movies, while attending to a lengthy family hospice situation. As strange as it felt spending the month of October bingeing on Christmas movies, it was enlightening. Surveying films between the years 1935 and 2024, one sees a number of patterns and tropes fly by, evolving with the culture year by year.

Subsequently I partnered with my good friends at the evangelical ministry Geeks Under Grace to put my ideas to paper, publishing 10 weekly articles on the subject between November and December 2024. But even as I was penning those first essays, I struggled to find the right words; I didn’t have an answer in mind from the outset, merely a series of arguments and anecdotes. I would need to find my thesis in the act of writing this book.

There aren’t enough books written about Christmas films as a genre. If there are many, they are buried under an ocean of histories for specific films, best-of collections, or works written by obscure academics.

It’s easy enough to find resources on the production history of “It’s a Wonderful Life” but less so about the subgenre that flows out of it. Much has been said about the great entries in the subgenre: how “Miracle on 34th Street” became the first financially successful Christmas movie in 1947; how “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story” were popularized via television broadcasts; how “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol” became the first animated Christmas special specifically released for television in 1962; how 2003’s “Elf” is the last Christmas film to be considered a blockbuster.

There is less said about what connects these data points.

One of the few experts on the subject I found was Scottish scholar Tom Christie, who has published multiple books on the history of Christmas films in the past decade through Extremis Publishing, including “The Golden Age of Christmas Movies: Festive Cinema of the 1940s and ’50s” and “A Totally Bodacious Nineties Christmas: Festive Cinema of the 1990s.” The rest of the insight I found was buried in individual articles and YouTube essays, to which I owe a tremendous debt for helping me shape the greater picture. They helped me break through my writer’s block and made the connections I needed to complete the project.

However, the seeds of insight I found in my reading turned me away from the films themselves.

From first principles, there can be no understanding of Christmas movies without first understanding Christmas. And there is no understanding of Christmas without understanding religion, society, secularism, consumerism, and the nature of what American society considers “normal.” It was only through this that the seed blossomed into what I think is the best achievable conception of a Christmas film, and only by leaning into my Christian faith did I begin to see these films and the unique glow that turns a regular film into a Christmas film.

I apologize to any secular readers who may have picked up this book imagining it would be relatively areligious, but I must beg their pardon in the necessity to discuss these issues through the lens of theology. I’m a practicing Christian, and I cannot help but think of life through the lens of a high-church Protestant. However, Christmas is a Christian holiday (at least tacitly), and I don’t think it’s possible to completely excise Jesus from the day bearing his name — at least not without turning the holiday into a parody of itself.

Christianity teaches us that Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, became flesh and walked among us. He was both fully God and fully man and became the hinge of history. He was a paradox, described in His Nativity by the apologist C.S. Lewis, “Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”

The idea that a God so seemingly wrathful, distant, and lawful would be so humble as to allow Himself to be born as a fleshy human baby to a peasant woman in the backwater of the Roman Empire is strange. But this is the event Christmas celebrates — a contradiction and a miracle; the fullness of history fulfilled in humility; the logos breaching into the world; a quiet resistance manifesting against the evils of this rebelling silent planet.

Reflecting on this and the modern reality of Christmas, an idea began to unfold slowly in my mind. The realization came to me that Christmas movies are not defined so easily but are defined by a connection to the supernatural. They are downstream of something greater, containing within them a small drop of the divine-like spring water filtering into a mighty river.

That water may no longer be clear and crisp, or even drinkable, but its flowing is evidence of a source.

Christmas movies are utterly unique in modern film due to the way we interact with them. They are a subgenre unto themselves, intertextually linked with other Christmas movies and the holiday itself, but it is that very intangible glow that makes them unique. They contain an essence of what Lewis once described, in his book “The Problem of Pain,” as “the numinous”:

Those who have not met this term may be introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told, “There is a ghost in the next room,” and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It is not based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is “uncanny” rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called dread. With the uncanny one has reached the fringes of the numinous.

This is not to call Christmas movies dreadful but that they contain within them a sense of the supernatural, what we might call “awe.” Connecting with that awe is downstream of the supernatural source that created it. Christmas movies grab that stream like a third rail and feel electrified by it.

It may seem like a bit of a leap to say that mean-spirited and cynical movies like “Christmas Vacation” or “Bad Santa” are in some way a reflection of God’s divinity, but as we will come to see, the thing that sets Christmas films apart from other films is an embrace of the supernatural essence of Christmas.

A Christmas movie always contains an element of hope that warps cynicism and pain of its story toward an ideal.

A Christmas movie glows with Christmas spirit.

A phrase like “the true meaning of Christmas” does this too, alluding to some unspoken notion that culture agrees upon, that Christmas is meaningful because it changes people. It scratches upon something divine while remaining achingly human and unspecific.

That thing is not entirely limited to the faithful, as secular people enjoy Christmas too. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists all celebrate Christmas in equal measure. And while I wouldn’t say they celebrate in the same manner as I do at the communion rail on Christmas morning, they are communing with something beyond the superficial layers of cheap plastic junk that Christmas would be if it were merely another day in December.

This book is the result of many months of thought and reflection, brought into the world by the good graces of my friends and colleagues who helped me write it, host it, critique it, and bring the original articles to fruition, here expanded to a thematically rounded 12 chapters. Each chapter has been revised to reflect the conclusions I discovered in the very act of writing the book. One often finds his destination only by setting out on an unknown journey!

So let us start by asking the most immediate and controversial question and then let our understanding unfold: Is “Die Hard” a Christmas movie?

From there, we will discuss Christmas as a secular phenomenon; explore Christmas movies as a subgenre; the role religion, consumerism, normality, and nostalgia play in Christmas cinema; and close on the incarnational implications of Christmas films.

What is a Christmas movie?

Let’s find out!

The above essay was adapted from the book “Is ‘Die Hard’ a Christmas movie? And Other Questions About the True Meaning of Christmas Films,” which is available here.

​Book excerpt, Entertainment, Culture, Movies, Die hard, It’s a wonderful life, Elf, Criticism, Christmas, Christianity 

A CBS reporter, with an alleged history of inaccurate reporting, accused editor in chief Bari Weiss of censoring her story for “political” reasons. But journalist Michael Shellenberger outlined other reasons Weiss may have had concerns.

A Sunday episode of “60 Minutes” was slated to air a 13-minute segment on the infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. The segment, “Inside CECOT,” aimed to highlight the stories of Venezuelan men who were deported to the terrorist detention center by President Donald Trump’s administration.

‘An editorial decision is not the same as censorship.’

Less than 48 hours before the segment was scheduled to air in the U.S., Weiss pulled it, arguing that it was flawed and incomplete, according to the New York Times. During a Monday newsroom call, she reportedly stated that the segment was removed “because it was not ready” but that she looked forward to airing it “when it’s ready.”

“We need to push much harder to get [the Trump administration’s] principals [sic] on the record,” Weiss wrote in an internal memo to “60 Minutes” producers, the Times reported. She suggested pursuing an interview with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Weiss also reportedly instructed producers to obtain more information about the criminal history of the deported men.

“We do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story,” she wrote. “In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.”

Sharyn Alfonsi, the reporter who created the segment, accused Weiss of “corporate censorship,” according to a leaked email to colleagues. She explained that she had attempted to obtain a comment from the Trump administration for the segment but was unsuccessful, noting that this was one of the reasons Weiss had stopped it from running.

RELATED: Woke ’60 Minutes’ host Scott Pelley claims diversity is now ‘illegal’ in progressive rant at Wake Forest commencement

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In her original report, she claimed that the Department of Homeland Security declined an interview request. However, the White House reportedly responded on Thursday.

“’60 Minutes’ should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are [sic] removing from the country,” the White House spokesperson stated.

While the segment did not air in the U.S., it was broadcast in Canada because it was not pulled in time, the Times reported.

The White House’s statement did not appear in the original report.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote Monday, according to Fox News Digital. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Alfonsi added.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger criticized Alfonsi for having a history of “biased and inaccurate reporting.”

RELATED: ’60 Minutes’ finally responds to criticism for hit piece on Florida Gov. DeSantis: ‘Some viewers … applauded the story’

Sharyn Alfonsi. Photo by Marla Aufmuth/Getty Images for Texas Conference for Women

Shellenberger stated that in April 2021, Alfonsi worked on a “60 Minutes” episode that falsely accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of exclusively choosing Publix, a supermarket chain, to distribute COVID-19 vaccines because the company had donated to his political campaign.

He explained that Alfonsi made these false claims despite Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, repeatedly refuting the accusations.

After the episode aired, Moskowitz wrote in a post on X, then-Twitter, “@60Minutes I said this before and I’ll say it again. @Publix was recommended by [the Florida Division of Emergency Management] and [the Florida Department of Health] as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governor’s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”

Shellenberger noted that “three major liberal or left-wing fact-checking organizations” criticized the inaccuracy of the DeSantis segment.

He argued that Alfonsi has failed to present any evidence of “corporate censorship” concerning Weiss’ decision to postpone the CECOT segment.

“And an editorial decision is not the same as censorship, particularly since Weiss said she is delaying, not killing, the segment,” he wrote.

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​News, Cbs, Bari weiss, Sharyn alfonsi, Cecot, El salvador, Donald trump, Trump administration, Trump admin, Trump, Cbs news, 60 minutes, Michael shellenberger, Politics 

It’s Christmastime, and you can feel the shift in the air.

Something has changed in the nation’s mood. People smile more easily. Familiar music returns. And — quietly but unmistakably — you can say “Merry Christmas” again without apologizing for it. The president of the United States quotes the Gospel of John when he speaks about Jesus.

Christians need to face a hard truth: The truce was a mistake.

For a few short weeks, Americans remember what this season is actually about. Not a generic winter festival. Not a vague celebration of “light” or “togetherness.” But the birth of Jesus Christ — a real event in history that changed everything.

For centuries, Christians have marked this season to reflect on the incarnation of the Son of God. “Christ is the reason for the season” is not a slogan; it is a confession. God entered history. He took on flesh. He came to save sinners. Christianity is not built on myth or metaphor but on eyewitness testimony to what actually happened.

America is now remembering — haltingly, imperfectly — the central role of Christ in its own history. That recovery follows decades of effort by atheists and secular ideologues to banish Christ from the public square. Unfortunately, Christians largely agreed to the truce that made this possible. They kept their faith private while Marxists were happy to occupy public education.

In the 1960s, American Christians accepted what amounted to a truce. I half-jokingly call it the Madalyn Murray O’Hair deal. The now largely forgotten atheist activist sued to remove prayer and biblical instruction from public schools. Christians acquiesced. Public education, they were told, would be “neutral.” Religion would be kept out. Faith would be private.

Christians kept their side of the deal.

The Marxists did not — because they never agreed to one. They announced their intentions openly. They promised to march through the institutions, and they did. Universities filled with faculty who identify as left or far left and who teach Marxist frameworks as settled truth.

Today, it is easier to find a committed Marxist on campus than a practicing Christian.

For 60 years, Marxist philosophy crept into K-12 education and then saturated higher education. What was once smuggled in under euphemism is now proudly declared. Professors announce their ideology on syllabi and use taxpayer dollars to teach students that America is structurally racist and that “whiteness” is a form of oppression.

There was never neutrality. There was only a vacuum — and Marxism rushed in to fill it.

I saw this emptiness firsthand on my own campus at Arizona State University.

At ASU’s West Valley campus, administrators recently installed a “winter wonderland” display. Not Christmas lights — “winter” lights. Decorations carefully stripped of any reference to Christ. The existential meaninglessness was almost overwhelming.

Lights were strung up to flicker briefly in the darkness before being taken down and discarded. What did it mean? What did it point to beyond itself?

Or, as Hemingway wrote, was it simply nada y pues nada y pues nada — nothing, and then nothing, and then nothing?

This is what happens when you preserve form while evacuating content. Ritual without meaning. Celebration without hope. Light without truth.

Christmas is the opposite of that.

Christmas does not offer a vague lesson about darkness giving way to light. It proclaims that Jesus Christ is the light of the world. It is not a symbolic story to be endlessly reinterpreted but a declaration that Christ was born in history, of a virgin, in fulfillment of prophecy, to redeem a fallen world.

That is why efforts to drain Christmas of its meaning always feel strained. When leftists substitute “winter celebrations” and “seasonal observances,” they do not offer neutrality. They offer emptiness — sometimes dressed up as inclusion, sometimes as bureaucracy, sometimes as pagan revivalism. Light shows without the Logos. Rituals without redemption.

Christians need to face a hard truth: The truce was a mistake.

There is no neutral education. There never has been. Every curriculum conveys values. Every institution forms souls. The only question is whether students will be formed in the light of Christ or in the ideology of those who openly despise Him.

RELATED: The truth about Christmas: Debunking the pagan origin myth once and for all

Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Christmas exposes the lie of neutrality. It reminds us that history has meaning, that truth entered the world, and that human beings answer to something higher than administrative guidelines or ideological fashion.

So this year, I am not whispering, “Happy Holidays.” I am saying, “Merry Christmas” — to students, to colleagues, to anyone who will hear it.

Parents and students should remember something crucial: Universities answer to you. You are not passive consumers. You set expectations. You decide what kind of formation is acceptable.

When you see your professors, say, “Merry Christmas.” Say it cheerfully. Say it unapologetically. What you are affirming is not sentiment but truth: that Christ came into the world, and no amount of bureaucratic rebranding can erase Him.

The lights will flicker and fade. Christ will not.

Merry Christmas.

​Christians, Christmas, Radical left, Marxists, American left, American christians, Opinion & analysis, Atheists, Madalyn murray o’hair, Lawsuits, First amendment, Faith, Public square, Prayer in school, Arizona state university, Neutral 

Members of the Bethany Lutheran Church in Ashtabula, Ohio, said they were speechless to find that someone had vandalized their Nativity scene ahead of Christmas.

The near life-size display was found scattered on the ground, and a church worker initially believed the wind had blown it down. However, they discovered evidence that it was intentionally vandalized.

‘All I know for sure is we need to pray for the person or persons who did that because God wants us to pray for their soul, and it’s going to be hard to do that, but that’s what we have to do.’

“You could see the tire tracks coming in from the north, and we are 50 feet off the road,” said Bob Oxley, who has put up the display for five years. “They came through one time, wiped it out, came through a second time, wiped it out again.”

He said there were three sets of tire tracks going through the location of the display, and on the third pass, the vandals destroyed the lighting that was set up.

“Life-sized characters. You could see they are driven in the ground with conduit to hold up to the wind. They came down, they went down through the whole length of it, and it’s probably 10, 20, 30, 40 feet long,” he added.

Church board member Jackie Featsent said she has worshipped at the church for most of her life and cannot understand what would motivate the vandalism.

“It’s just so sad that somebody would have such hate for something that is supposed to bring joy. Why would somebody have such hate to do something like that? I don’t understand, I can’t understand that,” said Featsent.

Oxley estimated that the damages added up to about $1,500 and said the display was unrepairable.

RELATED: Church displays political Nativity scene with Jesus in zip ties and centurions as ICE agents

“The last couple of years, it just seemed so much bigger and nicer,” Featsent added. “Bob had it spread out, added some extra lighting. You could see it from the main drag another block over, but you could see it from there. It just stood out.”

The church filed a police report, and church members hope cameras will help catch the culprits responsible.

“All I know for sure is we need to pray for the person or persons who did that because God wants us to pray for their soul. And it’s going to be hard to do that, but that’s what we have to do,” Featsent added.

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​War against christmas, Anti-christian vandalism, Nativity scene, Ashtabula church, Politics