The traditional Via Meadia Yule Blog continues today, Boxing Day, with the second of the Thirteen Posts of Christmas. From Christmas Eve through to Twelfth Night, we explore the Christmas story and the ideas behind the celebration.

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! Chrismas is a tense morning wherever the Meads gather, as we jump whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other person’s presents. I’ve never known anybody to actually get an extra present this way, but we are nothing if not determined and we all continue to try. If you call us on Christmas Day, don’t expect anybody here to answer with “Hello?” and give you a chance to say “Christmas gift!” We are onto this trick and to protect our rich hauls of presents we always answer the phone with an aggressive “Christmas gift!” to get in first. So don’t call us unless you are ready to part with a present.

Peter Berger will not post on his blog this week. He will celebrate the Christmas holiday. In fear of ACLU lawsuits, he will carefully restrict the celebration to spaces not supported by the taxpayers. The blog will resume in the New Year.

Wishing all readers of the blog a happy holiday, or non-holy day, as their faith or lack of faith may suggest.

– PLB

It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia: our annual Yule Blog when we update and present our thirteen posts of Christmas running from the preparatory Advent blog on Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During this holiday season in 2013-2014 we will blog on a light holiday schedule through New Year’s Day and on January 2 we will be back at full force.

South Sudan was never stable. It was never on a trajectory toward becoming a normal Westphalian state, no matter what foreign observers hoped and wished.

The vote by the 5,000-member American Studies Association to support the academic boycott of Israel, reportedly by a 2-1 margin, has evoked many responses, but none so far has identified the irony at the core of the matter.

The ASA’s misguided alliance with the BDS movement is just the tip of the iceberg. Academe’s intellectual and moral rot runs deep.

Setting up an American-style university in Vietnam has got to be easier than winning a war, doesn’t it?

The U.S. government’s Plan Colombia worked almost despite itself.

Somalia’s informal banking system is one of the only coherent institutions in the country—so why is U.S. policy undermining it?