Other than having the obligate end-of-the-semester cold, I'm having a great Christmas eve. I finished my grading on Sunday. On Monday, I went into the office and wrapped up a few loose ends -- I put a sign on the door to let people know I would be out and folded and distributed the solstice cards I had printed out on Friday, but had forgotten to take around. My card this year has a picture of Charlie on ice-skates and inside it says, "Solst-ice Greetings". Increasingly, it is being recognized in the popular media that some people celebrate the solstice as opposed to Christmas or something else. Yesterday, there was a Rug Rats sequence on Nickelodeon that parodied A Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Basically, wherever someone said "Christmas" they replaced it with "Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice". I quit watching when they transformed Linus's speech into some politically correct drivel, though. I suppose it was no worse than the religious dogma in the original.
Recently 
Real Live Preacher was mentioned on boingboing. This man has devoted himself to his religious practice in spite of his disbelief of god, out of a sense of 'faithfulness'. This reminds me of why I chose to devote myself to science education. Ever since I was a kid, I saw it as my mission to try to save the world. In particular, I saw the depletion of natural resources and destruction of the ecosphere as the critical problems that needed to be addressed. But how do you change behavior on this scale? I decided that education was the best means to do so. I have a hard time seeing religion as an activity that empowers people, except maybe unitarianism.