Today, September 4, is the Feast of St Rosalia, patron saint of Palermo, Sicily—and also, surprisingly, of evolutionary studies. Wikipedia says:

Saint Rosalia was proposed as the patron saint of evolutionary studies in a paper by G.E. Hutchinson.^[3] This was due to a visit he paid to a pool of water downstream from the cave where St. Rosalia's remains were found, where he developed ideas based on observations of water boatman. The article, and its reference to St. Rosalia has lived on through the literature, often in the title of papers concerning biodiversity.^[4]

Oh, this evening was also the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which extends over September 5 (feast day of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta) and ends at nightfall September 6 (when the Church of England memorializes Allen Francis Gardiner, a missionary who starved to death in Patagonia in 1851).

It has now become a multicultural must to step on Christmas by never mentioning it except in connection with other "holidays", notably Hanukkah, aptly described by American Heritage's Frederic Schwarz (December 2000) as the "Jewish Kwanzaa". But the MSM somehow neglects to provide the nearest Saint's day in the Christian calendar to each year's Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover—there are a lot of saints!—so it has become a VDARE.com service (as so often) to fill the gap.

All good clean fun, of course—except that there really is a War On Christmas, exemplified a few days ago by a Berlin district's decision to ban public celebrations of Christmas because Muslims might be offended. It really is driven by Christophobia and the desire to to destroy the West, and Conservatism Inc. has recently shown itself utterly incapable of resisting this Cultural Marxist onslaught.

Nevertheless, VDARE.com does wish all its readers a Happy.

We mean it.