Christmas delivers more traditions, festivities, and entertainments than all other American holidays combined. Worshippers sing traditional carols and hymns, and light Advent candles. In their churches and homes, they set up nativity scenes, a practice created in 1223 by St. Francis of Assisi. On the other side of the fence are secular holiday traditions. Originally modeled on a fourth-century bishop, St. Nicholas of Myra, Santa Claus has long been an icon of the Christmas season. We set up and decorate fir trees in our living rooms, fix stockings to the mantle, send out Christmas cards, buy sleigh loads of presents, and tell the little ones about Santa’s elves and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The world of arts and entertainment exuberantly joins these festivities. We read books such as Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” and share poems with our children like Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” or Dr. Seuss’s “How …