Let's Keep Christmas Commercialized
Today is Black Friday, the start of the Christmas shopping season. Every year about this time, there rises a hue and cry about the “commercialization” of Christmas, accompanied by impassioned pleas to get back to the “real meaning” of the celebration. Too much time and money, we hear, are spent on the public side of the holiday—the hustle and bustle of shopping, the lavish decorations, and the often insincere displays of seasonal piety. Meanwhile, the true spirit of Christmas gets left behind. Some even argue that all public displays of Christmas are inappropriate.

Thanksgiving and God
On Thursday, September 24, 1789, the First House of Representatives voted to recommend—in its exact wording—the First Amendment to the states for ratification. The next day, Friday, September 25, Congressman Elias Boudinot from New Jersey proposed that the House and Senate jointly request of President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving for “the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Boudinot said that he “could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”

Give us this day...
It is good manners in religion to ask God's leave in all things. It is robbery to make use of a man's goods, and to waste and consume them without his leave. We must ask God's leave upon this account, because, though God gives these good things to men, yet he still reserves the property in himself; for by distributing blessings to the creature, he never intended to divest himself of the right. As a husbandman, by scattering his corn in the field, did not dispossess himself, but still keeps a right and means to have the increase; so when the Lord scattereth his blessings, we only receive them as stewards, not as owners and proprietors: God still is the supreme Lord, and only hath the propert

Thanksgiving and Marginal Utility (Part Two)
In the early 1870s, Karl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras simultaneously and independently discovered the principle of marginal utility. Their discovery transformed economic analysis. They observed that value, like beauty, is subjectively determined. Value is imputed—a familiar Calvinist theological concept—to scarce resources by the acting individual. Other things remaining equal, including tastes, the individual imputes less value to each additional unit of any good that he receives as income. This is the principle of marginal utility.

Thanksgiving and Marginal Utility (Part One)
His mercy endureth forever: this phrase appears in many of the psalms, but when you find the same phrase three times in a row, you can safely conclude that the writer was trying to make a point, and he thought the point was important. I know of no passage in the Bible where any other phrase appears three times in succession.