The great thing about Christmas is the tradition. Not just a particular tradition, but the whole heaping smorgasbord of rites, customs and practices cooked up over the centuries to meet some primal human need to praise Heaven as we simultaneously raise a little hell. Perhaps the best way to summarize this crazy menu of everything from sacred candlelight services to cheesy decorations to anticipation-crazed kids to those grown-up get-togethers that are the lifeblood of the headache-relief industry is what Dickens so pithily called “to keep” Christmas.

It’s all great, with one exception. (Two, if you count the increasingly popular tradition of bastardizing Christmas songs with topical, allegedly humorous lyrics.) One, if you want to stick with the very irritating and, I fear, growing tradition of fretting about Christmas.

There’s the fretting you hear while waiting in the check-out line or on those call-in radio shows that appeal to self-absorbed – I can never buy Aunt Marge a present she likes, the ex and I can’t work out a civil way to share the kids during the holidays; therefore, I hate Christmas. I refer these fretters to a story from last Sunday’s New York Times – there are in that city more than 2,000 kids, the children of World Trade Center and emergency workers, who will pass this Christmas without a mom or dad they had last year. Sort of makes Aunt Marge and the ex seem manageable.

The fretting that really chaps me, though, is of the institutional variety – organizations that want to pare this rich buffet of tradition down to one bland entree. The devoutly religious often are portrayed as society’s busybodies, but in this I find them quite blameless. They might not join in knocking down red and green Jell-O shots at the adult get-together, but you rarely see them busting up the joint with hatchets. No, the institutional busybodies tend to come from the secular end – that’s why in many municipal parks these days you can bang drums at a summer solstice festival in June but you can’t put up a manger come December.

The worst example of this desire to erase any trace of spirituality from Christmas is a recent essay produced by the Ayn Rand Institute titled, “Why Christmas should be more commercial.”

Those of you who were in school back when the reading of bad literature was thought to build character know the work of Ayn Rand – combine the shallowest philosophy (Me first!) with bombastic prose and you get novels, like “The Fountainhead,” that make the morning after an adult get-together seem like a picnic.

What you may not know is that there are well-educated and theoretically intelligent people today who, with an entire universe of career options before them, chose to make propagating Rand’s dreary Objectivism their life’s work. They crank out these sad essays by the ream and send them to newspapers, most of which carefully file them away for safekeeping.

Until now, my favorite was one of this fall on the issue of exploiting the natural resources of Mars (there’s a hot topic for you). The ARI view is that the United States should lay claim to the Red Planet, then deed the mineral rights to corporations that would blast off and start digging. Luckily, Enron didn’t get in on this – the entire solar system would be in Chapter 11.

The Christmas piece outdoes that. It begins with a rant on how (news flash) many of the customs, and even the date, of Christmas have pagan roots; therefore, the “Christians stole Christmas.” It continues by asserting that the holiday only took off when the Industrial Revolution made mass production and marketing possible, and that spirituality and mirth are incompatible; therefore, the thing to do is to “take Christ out of Christmas” and let it be what it ought – a celebration of selfishness. Rand Almighty.

I read an excellent story Wednesday in USA Today on why the death toll at the World Trade Center was not higher – it’s now pegged at about 2,800, down from the original estimate of more than 6,600. That as many as 11,000 people got out of the towers is due largely to some effective evacuation procedures enacted after the 1993 bombing, but also to some extraordinary acts by ordinary men and women.

More than 100 of the dead are people who could have been bystanders to the tragedy but instead rushed in to help, like the mechanic who ran from his building down the block and died trying to repair damaged elevators. That night, I happened to re-read Matthew’s brief account of the Nativity. It struck me that it is a similar story. The wise men, made aware of Herod’s murderous intent, disobeyed his order to return and report the baby’s location. That the bloodthirsty tyrant then murdered all boy babies in the region makes clear that the Magi put themselves in great peril to save a total stranger. When Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt, they gave up everything – work, home, family, friends – to protect their child.

Taken just as history, with no religious connotation, Matthew’s few paragraphs add yet another rich dish – courage and sacrifice – to this amazing Christmas feast we’ve thrown together.

The best Christmas story of the season, though, is one I saw on local TV the other night. In the small town of Burnham in Waldo County, school kids decided to pass on the usual classroom party and instead made gifts and threw a bash for the town’s elderly. The elderly were thrilled of course, but the kids – their beaming faces were smeared with spirituality and mirth. It looked delicious.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.