Tim Woodcock writes... Though I had heard the Stevie Wonder song “Someday at Christmas” before, I didn’t really pay it much attention until I heard it on “the Uncle Lanny mix” about 20 years. Let me explain. Uncle Lanny is my wife’s uncle who lives in the Boston area; 20 years back, he gave us a CD, burned from his computer, of Christmas music. In my immediate family, it’s become a tradition of many years standing to start Advent, the countdown to Christmas, by listening to this CD (although nowadays the music is organized as a Spotify playlist).   It starts with Nat King Cole singing about chestnuts roasting over an open fire, then Elvis Presley is experiencing a Blue Christmas – standard stuff but it’s a tastefully curated mix of Christmas hits. The song that always catches my ear, the song that always makes me catch my breath, is Stevie Wonder’s version of “Some Day at Christmas.” The song begins this way: Someday at Christmas men won't be boys Playing with bombs...

Tim Woodcock writes… This is a very striking photo that encountered recently. I received it embedded in an email from an organization called Embrace the Middle East. While its meaning might seem plain, there was no caption, so I put it aside for a few days, assuming that it was a tragic candid photo of a church nativity scene, somewhere in the Palestine/Israel area, in which the church had been badly damaged. But there is more to the story than that... Several days later, it occurred to me that with the wonders of technology, I could do a “reverse image search” online to find out what exactly the photo was portraying. Many companies offer this feature; Google’s search worked best for me. It’s an image from Bethlehem that began to be circulated about 10 days ago. It does not show a recently bombed church at all but is an artistically created creche in the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. To reflect the warzone around them, the church create the seasonal decoratio...