Far too often, the celebration of Christmas is finished before it has even had a chance to begin. Christmas trees are toppled before Epiphany, carolling concludes by 26 December, and wreaths are rounded up one and all. Lay Catholics are called to holiness within the world, to embody the life and rhythms of our faith not only in church, but in the market and the home as well. In that spirit, I would like to announce a kind of Christmas crusade, a Holly War, if you will, to take back Christmastide and restore some good humoured Catholic sensibility to our secular lives. Our first step in this gallant undertaking is to reclaim the traditional twelve days of Christmas, and especially the Twelfth.