Today is Christmas, and thus an opportunity for many who think of themselves as adherents of the Christian faith to lecture everyone else sternly about the need to "put Christ back into Christmas."

This is, after all, His birthday, they remind us -- although, actually, it's almost certainly not, but that doesn't really matter as Dec. 25 stands in for it at a conveniently miserable time of year when European pagans would otherwise quite sensibly have gone on celebrating the imminent return of shorter and warmer days to their deeply chilled continent instead of the somewhat less imminent, as it turned out, return of their saviour.