Commentary Seventeen years ago, I reprised a Christmas column I’d written in the 1990s for a Texas newspaper. The original column and the 2004 interpretation celebrated a holiday prayer conceived by my favorite grand-aunt, Aunt Lillian, a before-the-big-meal “grace” of gratitude and humble spirit composed with a mother’s grasp of Thanksgiving and Christmas appetites and enthusiasms. In 2004 I spent several months on active duty in Iraq. My family and I felt a great deal of gratitude for my return. I gave Lillian’s prayer before both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Allow the detour, but Aunt Lillian was a delightful lady and a character. Born in 1900 in Manhattan—on West 84th Street between Broadway and West End—the Aunt Lillian I knew was an elegant, cosmopolitan New Yorker to the core. However, she was born to poor German Catholic immigrants and had an impoverished childhood. Over the years she gave me the …