Here at Cow Eye Community College, our accreditors are due to visit us in mid-March during the traditional accreditation season, and so we have decided to reschedule our annual faculty/staff Christmas party to coincide with their visit. In doing so, we hope that this event will serve as a symbol of all that is life-affirming in the world: the coming of eternal spring, the promise of re-emerging life, the birth and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and, most importantly, the re-affirmation of our college’s regional accreditation.

Instead of conducting this annual gathering as a single two-hour event as we have in the past, this year we will hold it over several days. In fact, we will organize an entire week’s worth of Christmas festivities to take place in honor of the accreditors’ visit: a Christmas Week!

Our Christmas Week will be a coordinated series of activities that will be intricately planned and meticulously implemented. Having our celebration over an entire week in March will also give us more time to impress our accreditors, to unify our faculty, and to build gradually toward the ultimate culmination of events at the Christmas party itself on March twentieth.

One of the key elements of the party will be its emphasis on diversity. Atheists. Anti-socials. Agnostics. All will be welcomed into the small cafeteria on March 20. Vegetarian and anti-vegetarian. Friend and foe. Specialist and generalist. Sunni and Shiite. The poet. The empiricist. The agoraphobe. The dreamer. The cliometrician. All of them will be encouraged to come to our Christmas party on March 20 where they will be treated to a truly inspiring, a genuinely sensational, an eminently toe-curling and earth-shattering Christmas yuletide experience.