No holiday presents religion reporters as many challenges — or opportunities — as Christmas. With just three weeks to go, it’s time to start planning for that Dec. 25 centerpiece editors are always clamoring for. With some early legwork, however, Christmas could actually be an easy glide onto Page One — and, with any luck, a good entry for the RNA’s Supple Writing Contest.

The financial meltdown is an obvious place to start. This year, many families may actually be paring down Christmas instead of just carping about it. The key is finding a family that is consciously trying to do Christmas differently, whether it’s because of unemployment, home foreclosure or some other aspect of economic hard times. What are the challenges that come up, and how does the family solve them?

• See a Nov. 25, 2008, Chicago Tribune column, “A blackout on Black Friday? Not completely,” about trying to keep Christmas real by choosing gifts of a different kind.
• Also beware of misguided nostalgia. Stephen Nissenbaum, professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts and The Battle for Christmas, an account of the American domestication of the holiday, reminds us that commercialism has always been a part of Christmas, and so too the calls to contain it.
• Then again, perhaps the scenes of consumer mayhem on Black Friday — including the trampling death of a Wal-Mart worker at a Long Island mall — mean that Americans will stop to reflect on the reasons that Christmas was for years banned by Puritans as a licentious festival of pagan origins, which in fact it was.

The “December dilemma” of interfaith families is an evergreen, so to speak. But this year the holidays coincide so neatly that the story is unavoidable. Hanukkah begins at sundown Dec. 21, which means Jews will be lighting the fourth candle of the menorah on Christmas Eve. Find a family that’s committed to celebrating both holidays, and follow them as they prepare for the highlights and pitfalls of doing so. Read some past Religionlink tips on interfaith celebrations and their challenges here and here.

Christmas is a great time to write about children. Find a child who has overcome a hurdle this year — physical or emotional – and tell his/her story. One powerful setting to write about children is in a Christmas play or pageant. Follow the rehearsals till opening day. Approach the story as a narrative, rather than a traditional news story. One of the best in this genre is Lisa Pollak’s Dec. 23, 1997, story in The Baltimore Sun on “the littlest angel.” (You’ll have to find it on Nexis.) The story is inspiring, not only for its content, but because it runs just 573 words—and Pollak won a Pulitzer Prize that year for just that kind of writing.

Also be sure to check out the ReligionLink archive of past holiday ideas   — they are oldies but goodies.