The joy of Christmas past.(THE LAST WORD)

The classic 1947 Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street, is the story of a man named Kris Kringle, who gets himself hired as Macy's department store Santa, then directs parents to whichever store carries the objects of their youngsters' sugar-plum-filled heads' desire--be it Macy's, or its arch-competitor Gimbel's. In one scene, Kringle, who believes he really is Santa, explains his motivation to Macy's personnel director, Doris Walker: "You see, Mrs. Walker, this is quite an opportunity for me. For the past fifty years or so I've been getting more and more worried about Christmas. Seems we're all so busy trying to beat the other fellow in making things go faster, and look shinier and cost less that Christmas and I are sort of getting lost in the shuffle."

Even in 1947, apparently, Christmas was not quite what it once had been.

This writer was born the year alter Miracle on 34th Street was released and, thanks to a doting grandmother who enjoyed taking me by bus into Manhattan during the Christmas season, I enjoyed firsthand many Christmas experiences popularized on the silver screen: visiting Santa (and seeing his live reindeer) at Macy's; seeing the towering Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center; watching the skaters on the adjacent outdoor ice-skating pond: and enjoying a walk along Fifth Avenue, with its elegantly decorated store windows. As we walked, we would take in the sounds of Salvation Army bell ringers and the smell of chestnuts and pretzels being roasted over the charcoal fires of pushcart venders.

Such Christmas visits were not all about secular trappings, beautiful though they were. My grandmother, being a devout Catholic daughter of Italian immigrants, had an entire "collection" of favorite churches in the area. No visit to Manhattan would be complete without at least a brief visit to a neighborhood church, and at Christmastime that included visiting the Nativity scene set up with plaster wise men and shepherds bringing their gifts to the stable where the baby Jesus lay.

In the public school 1 attended in third grade, we began each day with Bible readings, and we not only celebrated Christmas very openly, but the teacher also invited a Jewish boy to bring a menorah to school to explain how his family lit an additional candle on each night of Chanukah. Some people are under the misconception that the attack on Christmas originates with non-Christians, but I have found this to be untrue.

No, the attack on Christmas does not come from non-Christian people of faith--it comes from anti-Christian people of no faith. In a recent column, "Christmas--Going, Going ... Gone?" Don ...