Since chef Fadi Kattan was a child getting underfoot in his grandmother’s kitchen, the preparation and communal eating of the burbara pudding has been a pre-Christmas symbol of the coming of the holiday on the Palestinian West Bank.

This Christmas season brought a new trend: arresting the Grinch.

A Reflection for the Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Advent

Recent edicts and explanations of edicts out of Rome have ignited a familiarly unpleasant conflict in the U.S. church. And yet, though this will infuriate a vocal minority of my fellow Catholics, I just don’t get the brouhaha over the traditional Latin Mass.

Some derided the art as contemptuous of God and sacrilegious. What did artist Kelly Latimore intend to convey with the image? Is the picture meant to be a deification of George Floyd?

Our return to an in-person celebration of the birth of Jesus is also an opportunity to think about how we have done Christmas in the past—and perhaps even make some adjustments.