"The Atheist Christmas Carol," Vienna Teng (Virt)

During the year of Christopher Hitchens' and Richard Dawkins' meditations on a world without God, it seemed like kismet to have stumbled upon this 2003 song from this former software engineer's album Warm Strangers. Fans of the above authors will be disappointed, however; the confrontational title fronts a perfectly appropriate holiday ballad whose major nod to its title is its failure to use the word "Christmas." But it does round up the mixture of feelings the holiday evokes in a way that expresses empathy without vetting the listener for religious preferences. If that's a thumb in the eye to the hucksters who annually peddle a "War on Christmas," so be it.