Dear John,

Greetings from Birmingham, Michigan….home to Oakland Hills and a lot of other nice places. And home to a polyglot of people….some of whom love golf….some of whom love gambling….some of whom love Miller Lite….some of whom love the Lord….and some of whom love all four. 

Last week’s mail brought a Christmas letter from friends, the first line of which reads: “Well, another year under our belts….and I mean that literally.” And most of us can identify with that, since we will be saying pretty much the same thing, come the middle of January. For whatever else Christmas may be, it is an unbridled adventure of tasting and feasting, nibbling and snacking, that commences around the time the Thanksgiving Day Parade rolls down Woodward Avenue and concludes shortly after half time of the Orange Bowl.

Pardon me if I exaggerate, but it sometimes seems as if everyone I know is either starting a diet, or breaking one. We have become a people preoccupied with poundage. There is a slice of conventional wisdom which says: “You can never be too rich or too thin.” But we know better, don’t we? Especially the part about being too thin. “Thin” kills….some of our brightest and some of our best.

Everybody wants to talk about the baby, but nobody wants to talk about the birth. Except, that is, a group of women around a coffee pot who figured they knew me well enough to inquire as to which details I did know, and which I didn’t. Their questions had to do with the gynecological details of the nativity story. Apparently, they had been talking about Christmas and drifted into the subject of childbirth. Either that, or they had been talking about childbirth and drifted into the subject of Christmas. More to the point, they were interested in birth trivia….matters of labor and delivery.