Mix eight parts family and a whole bunch of music, friends and dancing and you’ve got the recipe for a perfect Celtic Christmas in Natalie MacMaster’s family.

With the secularization of our culture galloping away on all fronts,  Advent and Christmas can be haunting and haunted times of year.

HAMILTON – The audiences are generally well into senior years (and so are some of the performers), but the spirit in the rooms where the Harmonknights sing is forever young.

If all you want for Christmas is to be more spiritual — pray more deeply, contemplate on a higher plain — there’s a 16th-century app for that.

A greener Christmas might not be such a bad thing.

You may have wondered, and rightly so, why the ox and the ass appear so often beside the Christ child in various images of the Nativity.

From seeds for farmers to seed money for businesses, Chalice Canada has been evolving its charity work to match the fast-changing needs in developing countries.

Toronto’s Gardiner Museum has put up 12 artist-decorated Christmas trees again this year, but this time it’s about more than pretty baubles hanging from artificial trees.

Two simple words are all the payment Carla Martella needs for helping the Good Shepherd Ministries provide a holiday meal to the homeless and those in need.

For five decades, Fr. Thomas Raby held a very special place for readers of The Catholic Register. His weekly column — The Little World of Fr. Raby — was a favourite, with stories and messages that continue to resonate, even three years after his death at age 95. At right, we present one of his Christmas poems, which were a tradition for almost 40 years. As well, here is one of his Christmas columns, published Dec. 24, 1960, when the the Cold War was escalating.