Few banks offer them anymore, but Christmas club accounts were once popular ways to save for holiday spending. You put away a small amount every week for a year, earned a tiny bit of interest, and couldn’t access the money until November.

In our tradition, those we celebrate today are the good, the innocent, the blessed whose lives have brought them to the eternity of heaven. There are many more of them than those listed in the canon of saints, but they are no less important. So the question today, All Saints Day, is who are those saints in our lives?

Seventeen-year-old Valerie Herrera, a senior at Cristo Rey high school in Chicago, received the rare opportunity to ask Pope Francis a question via satellite on national television several weeks prior to the pope’s first visit to the United States.

Jim Heskett of Harvard Business School writes that in 2013 he attended a board meeting at ServiceMaster, a major corporation that sells cleaning materials and services. Heskett recalls that ServiceMaster CEO, William Pollard, spilled a cup of coffee prior to the start of the board meeting.

Minimalism seems to be all the rage these days. Maybe the recent recession and collapse of the real estate market was a big reality check. For a while, people had to cut back. But now, even though the economy and even the housing market has improved, many people seem to want to keep cutting back.

In the sacrament of Matrimony the promise of fidelity the couple shares with each other becomes a sacred and graced covenant between them. And so, God in return makes a covenant promise to be faithful and present to them on their life journey together.

In ancient times children were sacrificed to the pagan god Moloch in an area known as the Valley of Hinnom (Ge Hinnom in Hebrew), just south of what became the city of Jerusalem. By the time of Christ, the Greek word Gehenna had become associated with an evil place of fire, stench, and rotting flesh where wormy maggots never die—yuck!—in other words, hell.

The famous slogan “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” is often associated with Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. Near the end of his life, the coach said, “I wished I’d never said the thing. . . . I meant the effort. I meant having a goal. I sure didn’t mean for people to crush human values and morality.”

I hate math. I’ve never been good at it. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, my father is a math whiz and loved every minute of helping me with my math homework. I wanted to rush through it; he wanted to deliberate every problem and make sure I really understood it.

My dad and uncle owned a grocery store together. My mom and my uncle’s wife were sisters—two sisters married two brothers. Many years ago, at a family wedding, my Aunt Mary wore an expensive dress my uncle bought her from Marshall Field’s. Mom saved a few dollars to buy her dress from Goldblatt’s, not even remotely a chic store.