Points

We see the headlines every few years during The Holidays. Some doomed clergyperson ascends into the pulpit with the goal of delivering an idealistic sermon on the truth about Christmas, which, by definition, means discussing selfishness, materialism, mass-media scrooges and what not. Conservative clergy can throw in a few "Christmas War" references.

In my house tonight, the children will be waiting for St. Nicholas with eager joy. Not all Christian parents would be happy with this situation.

Some have decided that whether you call him Santa Claus or St. Nick, the Christmas Eve night caller is not welcome in their homes. The real St.

Nicholas, they say, was a holy bishop about whom little is known. This jolly fellow surrounded with legends of secret generosity or stories of elves and reindeer is really just a fib. And Christians don't lie to their children.

There is an obscure publishing doctrine known as "the small penis rule." As described in a 1998 New York Times article, it is a sly trick employed by authors who have defamed someone to discourage their targets from filing lawsuits. As libel lawyer Leon Friedman explained to The Times , "No male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis?

That's me!' "
P.D.

James is best known for her popular Adam Dalgleish detective novels, but the first of her novels to make it to the big screen is 1992's The Children of Men , which opens (minus the definite article) tomorrow. It's a futuristic thriller set in Britain in the 2020s, when the unexplained onset of total global infertility is ushering in the imminent doom of humankind.
Without Santa, there are no gifts in our home.

Nothing under the Christmas tree. No excitement. Many long faces.

No "happy" in "happy holidays."
Blame it on The Polar Express. Our family's Christmas Eve reading of this book was the warm-and-fuzzy crescendo in my overloaded attempts to make our children's holiday The Perfect One each year.

Ihaven't thought of Barbie since the '70s, when many a Christmas morning involved watching my little sister unpack the newest Barbie clothes and accessories ("Barbie's Beach Bus! Wild fun! Under the sun!

" went the commercial) to add to a growing Barbie compound that rivaled anything polygamist stud Warren Jeffs has going out west.
From as far back as we can trace human life, respect for the lifeless human body has been normative. The Neanderthal graves, at least 70,000 years old and probably much older, showed care for the deceased.

The body often was placed in a fetal position and accompanied by food, flowers, tools and an animal sacrifice, hinting at the hope for life after death. In modern times the body is usually buried or burned, sometimes on a pyre, sometimes in an oven, essentially always with dignity and sorrow, memory and love.
The medieval Italian poet Dante creates a macabre vision of twisted bodies, divided and rent asunder, as a manifestation in the flesh of the deforming consequences of sin.

In Body Worlds , a new exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Natural Science, the German scientist Gunther von Hagens has discovered a new means of providing anatomy lessons to the multitudes cuts, slices and dissections of "real" human bodies, preserved through a process called plastination.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!

Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Those are the words that started it all.

Six bearded imams are said to have shouted them out while offering evening prayers as they and 141 other passengers waited at the gate for their flight out of Minneapolis International Airport. It was three days before Thanksgiving. Allahu Akbar: God is great.

Flying while Muslim, like driving on the New Jersey Turnpike while being African-American, can be hazardous to one's civil liberties and human rights as well as to one's spiritual integrity.
My only regret about Mary Cheney's pregnancy is that it didn't happen earlier say, during the 2004 presidential race, when Ms. Cheney was working for her father's campaign and his running mate was busy trying to write discrimination against people like her into the Constitution.

Media outlets from across the country have flooded the Family Research Council with calls on our reaction to the news that Vice President Cheney's daughter, who has a lesbian partner, is expecting a child. We have purposefully declined to comment on the story, in order to maintain FRC's focus on policy discussions. However, when an event such as this is used by some as a catalyst for advancing a political agenda or promoting public policy that attacks traditional marriage or parenting, I have no reservations about stepping forward and defending morality and the family – regardless of who is involved.

Plenty of spin and recriminations filled the air following the midterm elections, but Rush Limbaugh could still be heard above the din. Conservative talk radio's most powerful voice caused a minor stir by declaring he felt "liberated" by the Democratic victories. Mr.

Limbaugh explained to his listeners, "I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don't think deserve having their water carried."
Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.

S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure," such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past. Changes in presidential rankings reflect shifts in how we view history.

While comic Michael Richards' tirade continues to make news, I ask you to turn your attention to a less-publicized racial gaffe. On Dan Patrick's ESPN Radio program, NFL-star-turned-NFL-analyst Michael Irvin postulated that Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, who is white, owes his athletic ability to the miscegenation of a distant relative with one of her slave hands. Or, as Mr.

Irvin eloquently put it: "[Mr. Romo's] great-great-great-great-grandma pulled one of them studs up outta the barn."
There's a joke I tell behind Miami's back.

I'll be elsewhere in the country and someone will ask how race and diversity are viewed from a South Florida perspective. I reply that, according to the Census Bureau, Miami's polyglot population represents what America will look like in about 40 years. And if America really understood that, it would be worried.

Rim shot.
It is not really news that Hollywood is still producing anti-business movies, but there is a certain irony in it nevertheless.
History may end up being kinder to President Bush than the voters were Nov.

7. That says less about the value of Mr. Bush's contributions than it does about the perverse conception of presidential greatness shared by historians who rank the presidents.

It's unfair to claim that George W. Bush is the worst president of all time. He's merely the fifth worst.

In the White House Hall of Shame, Mr. Bush comes behind four other Oval Officers whose policies were even more disastrous: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and James Madison.
After the 2004 election, a number of terribly depressed people at my university told me what a shame it was that President Bush had been re-elected.

If only people knew history, they lamented, they would never have voted for him.
The brother of my friend Osman was one of seven Sunni workers in a shop in a mixed neighborhood of western Baghdad who were rounded up at gunpoint recently by Mahdi Army militiamen and taken to the local Shia mosque.
Like many who voted for Gov.

Rick Perry, I had some questions following the Thursday Dallas Morning News article that described remarks he made at a meeting of public officials from the border region.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attack was undoubtedly a terrible tragedy.

But it could have been much worse. Eight years earlier, aides to Osama bin Laden met with Salah Abdel al-Mobruk, a Sudanese military officer and former government minister who offered to sell weapons-grade uranium to the terrorists for $1.5 million.

He proffered up a 3-foot-long cylinder. The al-Qaeda representatives agreed to the purchase because, after all, as one of them later said, "It's easy to kill more people with uranium."
When I was a student, we read many books about Western culture, democracy and the Greek philosophers.

We saw movies set in America, where people were able to speak their minds, and we figured that democracy would be the salvation for us and our country.
The U.S.

Marines entered Mosul from the north. I lived in the northern suburbs, so I saw the first American flag. When the Humvees stopped, I shook hands with the Marines, and I told them: "You are mostly welcome here.

Why don't you come to my house and drink some cold water?" They offered me a job.
Everyone knows that liberals love Starbucks.

A 2005 Zogby poll found that partisans of the left were twice as likely to go to the world-music-playing, fair-trade-embracing, Seattle-based coffee chain as they were to patronize Dunkin' Donuts a well-known peddler of red-state values. No surprise that Bill O'Reilly has declared that he "will not go in a Starbucks," preferring, according to Newsweek , "a coffee shop in Manhasset, Long Island, where cops and firemen hang out."
Despite her fame and good fortune, for most sentient adults Paris Hilton, the naughty blond heiress, personifies the decadence of our cultural moment.

With her nightclub brawls, her endless sexcapades, her vapid interviews, her rodentlike dog and her lack of ostensible talent, she reeks of every vice ever ascribed to our poor country.
After the smoke from each election clears, I try to mount an effort to strike a useless term from the dictionary of discourse.
Anxious witnesses to terrorism, technological revolutions and globalization, Americans are making seismic changes in the ways they live, work and play and those choices ultimately determine how they vote, what they buy and how they spend their Sunday mornings.

It's time to admit that "diversity" is code for racism. If it makes you feel better, we can call it "nice" racism or "well-intentioned" racism or "racism that's good for you." Except that's the rub: It's racism that may be good for you if "you" are a diversity guru, a rich white liberal, a college administrator or one of sundry other types.

But the question of whether diversity is good for "them" is a different question altogether, and much more difficult to answer.
Palmyra, N.Y.

, is not much different from the rest of the sleepy towns of western New York, save for one accident of history.
"Applebee's America" co-author Matthew Dowd, the Austin-based Republican consultant who was a top President Bush strategist in 2000 and 2004, spoke recently with Points editor Rod Dreher:
As one commentator recently quipped, Latin America can't compete on the world stage in any aspect, even as a threat. Unlike anti-Americans elsewhere, Latin Americans are not willing to die for the sake of their geopolitical hatreds.