When I was young, Christmas in the Sheehan household was a fairly predictable event. It began about 4 a.m., or whatever godawful hour my brother Brendan and I would drag our parents out of bed for our annual living-room reenactment of the battle of Thermopylae, with Mom and Dad playing the 300 Spartans trying to hold the pass against Bren and me, standing in for tens of thousands of Persians. The Christmas tree, of course, was Greece, and Mom and Dad never managed to hold out more than twenty minutes, let alone the historic seven days the... More >>>