Promise of Dawn

Barack and Michelle Obama’s White House Christmas message acknowledges “nonbelievers” as well as Christians, Jews, and Muslims. We talk with Florida activist Preston Smith, a middle-school teacher who bravely erected FFRF’s secular displays in a Boca Raton park to counter the Christian nativity scene. His displays were repeatedly vandalized and destroyed. Then we welcome the New Year with some hopeful music, including Shirley Horn’s “Everything Must Change,” Yip Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow,” Dan Barker’s “Promise of Dawn,” and freethinker Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” performed by Scottish singer Mairi Campbell.