But the mayor is still missing a cohort of kids whose lives would be better if they had a school and appropriate housing. The city has so far hardly noticed downtown Boston’s kids, a growing population compared to the rest of the city.

The 2010 census shows the state of affairs.  As a whole, Boston lost children in the past decade. In 2000, 116,559 children under 18 years of age lived in the city. In 2010, the number of children under 18 totaled 103,710, or 13,000 fewer kids.

But downtown Boston goes against the trend. Here, in all but three neighborhoods, the number of children is rising. Go figure.

The Back Bay, Bay Village, Beacon Hill, Downtown, Leather District, North End/Waterfront, and the South End have seen increases in the under 18 population from about 14 percent in the North End to 700 percent in the Leather District, which admittedly had only 6 kids living there in 2000. In raw numbers, the increase has been as disparate as 10 more kids in Bay Village to 399 more in the South End.

Curiously, Charlestown, a family-oriented neighborhood with slightly more affordable housing and the appealing Warren-Prescott elementary school, lost 139 kids. Chinatown and the West End also had reduced numbers of children. Alvaro Lima, director of research at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, can’t explain why these neighborhoods have fewer kids, and neither can their residents. In fact, Laura Carroll, a Charlestown Mothers’ Association board member, believes the numbers are wrong, since her group has seen an explosion of mothers seeking membership to CMA.

Despite disputed figures, it’s clear the downtown is attracting families with children. Almost 10 percent of the nearly 100,000 people in downtown Boston are under 18.

Lima doesn’t yet have an explanation for the decline of the numbers of children in the whole city or the downtown’s increase. He said he expects the decline is partly due to the economic crisis, the cost of living in Boston, and the trend for families to have fewer children. Perhaps the downtown increase has to do with the growing awareness in general of the convenience of cities.

Given such growth in the number of kids in one part of the city, one would expect the school department to be thinking of how to educate them. Given the attractions of downtown Boston for families, one would expect the city to be encouraging construction of family-size housing.

But it’s no on both counts. Downtown parents have clamored for more downtown schools for almost a decade. But no new downtown schools are planned, said Matt Wilder, BPS spokesman, although the Eliot in the North End is bursting at the seams, and there may be ways to increase its size. Both the Eliot and the Quincy in Chinatown are good schools, but they have waiting lists. The few available spots plus the uncertainly of school assignments in general discourage parents from even registering for the Boston Public Schools. Private schools then become an attractive option for families who want to stay downtown.

But private schools don’t solve every problem. Lacking parking and adequate, affordable family housing, many families in downtown Boston leave for Brookline and Newton, municipalities with cheaper housing and excellent, easy to figure out schools, when the kids get to be school age.

The mayor and the BRA see increased family housing as a goal, according to Randi Lathrop, deputy directory of planning at the BRA. But it’s hard to see progress on that front. New building projects have difficulty accommodating families because of downtown’s smaller sites and the greater need families have for storage, Lathrop said. But New York developers, who surely face similar challenges, routinely build multi-bedroom units. Just look at the New York Times magazine’s advertisements each Sunday.

So far the BRA has mostly let developers off the hook. One example is at The Victor, a residential building going up in the Bulfinch Triangle with a completion date in 2013. The Victor has no units with more than two bedrooms on a site that surely could accommodate more. This is a missed opportunity.

At least one project—Hayward Place—will feature 54 three-bedroom units, or about 20 percent of the total, when it is completed on Washington Street across from the new Ritz in 2013. It is the exception.

Fighting for schools and housing, it’s the one percent who stay downtown. They are the only ones who can afford the pricey digs and private school tuition.

Why is this bad? A uniformity of income makes a boring community. Having to provide for children in retail shops, restaurants, parks and schools makes neighborhoods more livable for everyone. Seeing children on the street makes most people happier. Few downtown residents want to live in what could, without action on the city’s part, become an old folks’ home. The Boston Public Schools will be better for having parents in all neighborhoods in the city engaged.

Mayor Menino, tweaking school busing and building skills in the trades for youth and adults at Madison Park will help alleviate some of the city’s problems. Meanwhile, set your mind to helping the growing number of kids and their families who need good schooling and good housing in the downtown.

• I’d plant Boston ivy to grow over selected sections of Boston City Hall. I will donate plants from my own city garden to make it cheap. The ivy would cover up the concrete—one of the worst and most dirt-collecting building materials ever invented—as well as giving the plaza a bit of green. The plantings would save city hall for the mid-century preservationists while covering up a good portion of it for the city hall haters. And Boston ivy is so lovely. It turns golden in the fall and leaves delicate trace lines in the winter.

• I’d opt for fun in what one wag a few years ago dubbed “the city that always sleeps.” I’d establish a fun committee to come up with ideas like the community sing Keith Lockhart organized. I’d bring back Summerthing or something like it. I’d institute Winterthing too.

• I’d heavily fine every landlord who left a commercial space at street level vacant for one year or more. Are their pockets so deep it doesn’t matter if a space isn’t collecting rent? Do they care about the degradation of a neighborhood their blank space contributes to? I wouldn’t give them the luxury of waiting until they could get top dollar. Lease the space at a lower rent, or pay the city for the ruin such spaces cause.

• I’d tweak zoning in the Seaport District to reflect Boston’s nature as a city of contrasts. I’d require that developers who obtain permission to build the larger hotels and office and apartment buildings be required to also build low-rise single-family and multi-family flats in five and six story buildings along several blocks on designated streets. I’d insist that they put in small corner stores. My intention would be to introduce mixes like those in the Back Bay or downtown Chicago, where small-scale neighborhoods abut the skyscrapers.

• I’d save money by ripping out and selling off the pedestrian push buttons at every corner, keeping only those located on wide, busy streets that attract few pedestrians anyway. At the same time, I’d coordinate every pedestrian walk signal with traffic going in the same direction, a practice every other American city follows. Boston’s silly buttons not only confuse tourists, but also encourage Bostonians to jaywalk, since we suspect we will never get a signal that gives us time to cross the street.

• I would transfer the money I’ve saved by eliminating the push buttons to the parks budget.

• I’d be bold in public works. I’d have the recycling picked up every time the guys pick up the trash. I’d institute year-round street cleaning and towing. I’d widen every sidewalk and relocate trees to the edge of the curb so those that now buckle the walkways would have their own space near the roadway to grow. I’d put street signs on the sides of buildings a la Paris to reduce the number of poles on the sidewalks.

• I’d go after the bicyclists. I’d mount a campaign clearly stating who has the right of way in Boston. First, it’s pedestrians. Then it is bicycles. Then it is cars. Then it is big trucks. I’d have the police lurk near intersections to crack down on bicycle riders who run red lights and narrowly miss pedestrians. (Prompted by a couple of times last week when I saw a bicycle rider almost hit a pedestrian. In one case the pedestrian jumped back, and the bicyclist peddled away without a glance.)

• I’d tame the traffic. I’d neck down intersections like London does. I’d also copy London in imposing a congestion charge. I’d spend the money earned from the congestion charge on faster filling the potholes and repairing the streets. I’d charge $50 for a neighborhood parking sticker each year for the first car in a household. A sticker for a second car registered to a household would cost $200. No stickers for three or more cars. I’d trade parking meters in every neighborhood for central pay stations on each block, like the Back Bay has. Then I’d charge $5 an hour for parking.

• I’d impose zoning on every neighborhood’s commercial district, making offices a conditional use, restricting the width of storefronts, and requiring special permits for chains or any businesses whose headquarters were located outside the Boston city limits. Conditional use permits would require businesses to clean their sidewalks and street gutters, plant window boxes or tree pits, and keep trees alive, among other obligations.

• You may have noticed that implementing and enforcing these ideas would provide more revenue and require more city employees. That would mean a few more jobs available in an economy that surely needs some.

I haven’t mentioned, of course, schools, crime or housing. But what about you? I’d like to hear from you what you would do if you were mayor of Boston.

The brilliant minds at work in that scenario now have another predatory move up their sleeves. They’re out to destroy retail districts. The banks don’t see this as their aim, but this is the result if they infest our neighborhoods with their blank windows.

Beacon Hill is seeing the worst of it right now, but other downtown neighborhoods are at risk. As much as North Enders complain about the noise and traffic from their restaurants, they would miss those annoyances if the restaurants became a line of bank windows.

Beacon Hill already has five banks, one credit union, a stand-alone ATM, and several other ATMs in shops throughout the Hill. On its edges are four more banks.

But Capital One wants to move into the prominent corner of Mount Vernon and Charles streets, displacing a small, heavily patronized convenience store. It’s not clear as I write this how that situation will turn out, since there was a huge demonstration of opposition to giving the bank relief from a quirky zoning problem. And spokesman Jimmy Hernandez confirmed that TD Bank is angling for a space on Cambridge Street, probably the large empty space at 250 Cambridge Street. Broker Martha Abrams-Bell, who, rumor has it, upped the price when a bank became interested, did not return a phone call.

These possible new banks arrive after the Hingham Savings Bank replaced an antique store on Charles Street and a People’s United Bank occupied space on Cambridge Street last fall.

Interestingly, no one has yet seen a customer at either of the new banks. It will be hard for them to attract a significant market share on Beacon Hill. Part of the problem is the banks that are already here, especially Cambridge Trust. Cambridge Trust’s warm staff, their participation in and support of the neighborhood, and that bank’s policies means that it already has as customers many of the long-term wealthier residents’ and most of the local businesses’ business. The new banks’ most likely customers will be students and short-term younger professionals with small accounts and few loan needs.

But these new banks may not want customers. During a recent meeting at which Capital One presented its plan to the Beacon Hill Civic Association’s zoning and licensing committee, the Capital One representative did not answer a question about why his bank wanted to come here. Instead he described how New York neighborhoods had opposed their presence but had become accustomed to it.

Real estate broker Ivy A. Turner, however, set the audience straight on why banks want to come. She said they don’t care so much about market share. They want a retail branch that acts as a billboard for their national expansion goals.

Why is that so bad?

It’s bad because a bank or other office sucks the life out of a retail street. It takes up space that otherwise would provide needed or desirable goods or services. Unlike a restaurant or a grocery store, it closes at night, and anything closed makes the sidewalk in front of it more dangerous. It provides nothing interesting to look at, an important part of the pedestrian experience. It offers nothing for tourists, who bolster Boston’s economy. Its deadening demeanor dampens the whole block’s vitality, causing neighboring shops to lose business. “No bank or real estate office creates value in a neighborhood,” said Jesse Baerkahn, a retail consultant who has been instrumental in the revitalization of Kendall Square.

Why don’t we object to Cambridge Trust, which would have the same effect? They were lucky enough to find a storefront that is near a major retail street, but not on it.

In sucking the life out of a community’s center, banks and other offices destroy the very reason they want to locate there in the first place.

And make no mistake about why we live in downtown Boston. It isn’t just because the neighborhoods are “tony,” as some media outlets like to insist.

We live here mainly because our neighborhoods are convenient, saving us time, money and anxiety. We don’t have to commute. We get everything delivered. We aren’t paying to heat a big single-family house in the suburbs, but a smaller place with only a front and a back exposed. Our pedestrian-friendly, serviceable commercial streets mean that when we do errands, we walk, we can wrap up our responsibilities in just a few minutes and enjoy seeing our neighbors while we do them. One of Boston’s most livable characteristics is that it has a lot of these neighborhoods, from the downtown to outlying places like Brighton and Roslindale.

So how do we keep our neighborhoods’ commercial districts vibrant, walkable, useful and appealing?

We rezone every commercial street to make ground-floor offices a conditional use, a process the BHCA has started. We refuse to do business with brokers or banks or any other office occupants that take over a space where a shop has been. We make known to building owners and potential office occupants that offices on the ground floor will meet hostility that will affect their bottom line.

Let’s off the banks before they off our neighborhoods.

We fill in the gaps with neighborhood associations, book groups and other neighborhood clubs, and the sidewalk, restaurants and local businesses that offer places for us to greet one another and catch up.

One increasingly common community builder is web-based—it’s an email forum or networking group using LISTSERV, Majordomo, bigtent.com or Google Groups that connects subscribers who are interested in the same topic and want to discuss it online without having to take extra time to go a web site like Facebook or Twitter. Often that topic is the neighborhood. And it often emerges from a neighborhood’s mothers. That is the age group that knows about this sort of thing.

“Since I came back I had to find some sort of community,” said Jessica Della Russo, who grew up in the North End and lives there again with her 5-year-old son, Ezio. She said people used to rely on telephones and telephone chains, but email groups are easier.

“I’m especially interested in finding options about being able to afford living in the city,” she said. The email networking group started by another North End mother a few years ago has helped her find and enjoy those options.

In 2009 the North End Waterfront Mother’s Association (NEWMA) email group became a “Google Group.” It has attracted 636 subscribers, not all of whom are mothers, nor do they necessarily live in the North End. Jessica has become one of the group’s moderators, and it was she who introduced me to the influence these groups are having.

Groups typically are not filtered through anything or anyone but a moderator who approves membership. The group is usually self-regulated, with participants complaining if someone gets out of line. And mercifully, compared to Facebook, commercial messages are unwelcome unless it’s something free.

The way groups work is that you find the web site and join the group, or you might receive an invitation. Then you receive emails from members in the group. You can send to the whole group, or reply to just the emailer.

I joined the LISTSERV group in the New England town where one of my daughters lives. We spend a lot of time there, I know many of her neighbors, and I want to follow their concerns. A recent hot topic focused on how to affordably repair a washed-out road. I just read the emails. I don’t send any myself. My daughter tells me I’m what is known as a lurker.

I’m now lurking in the NEWMA group too. (Jessica says that’s okay.) Recent messages from subscribers range widely. One noted that enrollment time for the Boston Public Schools starts in January. Several messages detail activities at the North End Branch Library, the North End Music and Performing Arts Center and the Greenway. A salon offered free blow-dries. One family had a toddler bed they were offering for free. Another family wanted to borrow a VCR. Did anyone know of a parking space for rent? A Northeastern grad student offered her babysitting services. A child lost his stuffed monkey at the playground. His mother wondered if anyone had found it.

Illustrating a trend in expensive, school-deprived, downtown Boston, a family moving to Newton wanted to rent out their two-and-a-half bedroom North End apartment. (What is a half bedroom?) But most of the interchange is from families with long-term downtown Boston plans, and the emails are not only about children’s matters.

“I’ve gotten some nice feedback from people who now feel more involved and even secure enough to propose their own initiatives, like a recent tot lot clean up,” said Jessica in an email.

The North End isn’t the only neighborhood to have an active email networking group, but they are all different. The South End Garden Moms, which started as mothers having coffee at the now-defunct Garden of Eden restaurant, claim a membership of about 2,000 subscribers. This group probably really wants only moms, since the moderator wouldn’t let me in. JP Moms also is a group.

Jessica says groups like these are a natural outgrowth of people knowing how to use technology and wanting to use it to find a sense of community in their own back yard.  “I find it fascinating to trace how a neighborhood or community evolves in this day and age,” she says.

It looks as if that evolution involves the Internet as well as the sidewalk.

• Hubway. Let’s give credit to Nicole Freedman, familiarly known as Boston’s bike czar, or czarina, as the case may be. The bike-sharing bikes and stands are good looking. Gradually they have been placed at more and more convenient spots. They’ve proven wildly popular. To those people who complain that Hubway doesn’t provide helmets, just go get your own. London’s bike-share program doesn’t provide helmets either.

A London friend explains why bike sharing is so good. He has his own bike, which he rode to work. But if was raining hard in the evening or he had to go somewhere after work to which he couldn’t ride his bike, he’d leave the bike at work. Then he wouldn’t have it for the next day’s commute.

Now, however, he doesn’t worry about the weather or his schedule. Depending on the day, he might bike both ways, or he might take the tube or walk to work and ride a bike home. Or vice versa.

It looks as if Brookline, Somerville and Cambridge will soon have at least rudimentary bike-sharing programs that will work in concert with Boston’s. Boston’s outer neighborhoods need bikes, but those will come.

Freedman was tight-lipped about the struggles to get this program off the ground, but it appeared that the struggles, including the costs, were significant. Good for her to persevere. She’s got a winner, and so do we.

• Mayor Menino’s light touch with Occupy Boston. Yes, the occupation cost Boston a lot of money in police time. There were a few holier-than-thou people who complained that the occupiers needed to get jobs. I wonder if those self-satisfied individuals knew how much student debt some of the kids had, or how hard they had tried to get jobs, or even if they were employed but out there on the Greenway when they were not working. And if one is lucky enough to have a job, the right thing to do is to give others a break.

The occupiers’ circumstances were all different, but some things were the same. The occupiers were largely benign. They and the police got along well. Their message was clear enough—they were the 99 percent. They dramatized the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, a condition that seems un-American to anyone who has pride in America’s promise of opportunity. So the mayor, who everyone says learned from those regrettable confrontations in Oakland and elsewhere, held his fire. The occupiers put the Greenway on the map. And they gave us a new term to use in jokes: the new robotic explorer that NASA sent off to the red planet in November? Occupy Mars. Iowa voting today? A threat to Occupy the Caucuses. (We’ll see if that comes off.) What our family called our 17-person Christmas dinner in New Hampshire? Occupy Francestown. What we’ll call the Beacon Hill Civic Association’s meeting tomorrow night, at which Capital One bank will try to get permission to move into Beacon Hill’s most prominent intersection? Occupy Zoning and Licensing.

• Apps: Flashlight. Leafsnap. MBTA Time. Pandora. Those are my favorites. These apps not only have great utility, but they show off the ingenuity of their creators with their ease of use and variety. The American inventive spirit is not dead if a guy sitting in his Somerville apartment can turn out a way for you to tell when the next train is coming, when the whole MBTA hasn’t been able to do it.

• The Boston City Council. I know, I know. They just hired one of their own to marry people at City Hall. But, aren’t you glad they are a serious bunch? Not loony like Dapper O’Neil. Not toxic like Louise Day Hicks. Not creepy, like city council wanna-be Joe Casper. Not crooked like Chuck Turner. Instead we’ve got honest and clever John Connolly and Matt O’Malley, not to mention Felix Arroyo, and Stephen Murphy, who looks like a typical Boston blowhard pol, but actually has all the facts and figures of Boston in his head. And wouldn’t Louise Day Hicks love it—Ayanna Pressley, an attractive, smart black woman topping the councilor-at-large ticket this past fall. Just because I didn’t mention the other councilors doesn’t mean I don’t like them. A few mishaps now and then, but they are honorable and refreshing—not like their embarrassing predecessors of old.

The same census showed 41,250 residents in Urbana, Illinois. I’ve seen with my own eyes the seven supermarkets within that city’s borders and about a dozen more in the neighboring city of Champaign.

What are we doing wrong?

Nothing, said Mike Tesler, a Bentley University retailing professor and a principal at Retail Concepts.

“The answer isn’t in the demographics or the consumers,” he said. “Supermarkets are large corporations, and it’s all about incremental dollars and expanding where they are going to get the most profits.”

Compared to the burbs or small cities, large cities’ sites are more expensive, they require more permitting, parking is a problem, and they may have to hire pricier union labor for the build-out. Moreover, even if residents want a supermarket, someone will complain. “It’s Boston,” Tesler explained.

Traditional supermarkets have lost market share each year to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s on the specialty end and Target and Wal-Mart on the low-price end. Cities are uncertain for them. “The last thing your traditional supermarkets are are risk-takers,” said Tesler.

He said the only way a supermarket would consider a location like downtown Boston is if they were assured they’d have no setting-up problems.

That’s why it looks as if Stop & Shop or another supermarket is likely to set up shop in Downtown North, also known as the Bulfinch Triangle. The Boston Redevelopment Authority, working with developer Trinity Financial, is minimizing the risks.

You probably think what you’re reading is nuts because all reports from the dailies to neighborhood newspapers are lamenting the demise of the supermarket.

Apparently no one talked to the BRA. Senior Manager Peter Gori said he is confident a supermarket will arrive. Serious conversation is going on between Trinity and Stop & Shop about taking over the 21,000 square foot retail space Trinity has made available on the ground floor of its proposed One Canal Street residential complex, he said.

Even though it is half the size of the second-floor space the supermarket originally was supposed to occupy, it is a better location. It is easier for pedestrians to get to. It is more visible from busy North Washington Street. Trinity and the BRA will make sure there are no permitting issues or, helped by Lia Tota’s supermarket committee, no troublesome neighbors. Tota, the director of ABCD in the North End, has led the pursuit of a supermarket.

Plus, if a larger site—one at the TD Garden’s long-delayed development, for example—should become available, Stop & Shop’s lease would have to allow them to move.

A spokeswoman for Stop & Shop wouldn’t comment. And Trinity’s project manager Sarah Barnat did not discuss these conversations in a meeting with the North End/Waterfront Residents’ Association a couple of weeks ago.

Nevertheless, Gori said the BRA was “single-minded” about getting a grocery store on the site. He was confident this would work out with Stop & Shop, and if not with that company, with another company because the space was so attractive. His agency is greasing the wheels, which Tesler said is the only strategy that would make a supermarket happen downtown.

Gori said the negotiations are now down to the terms of the deal. By the time you read this, they may be finished. If Stop & Shop can’t work it out, another supermarket will, he said.

It won’t be Wegmans, according to spokeswoman Jo Natale. She said Wegmans’ proposed store in Newton is a “new concept.” It is “urban” and its 70,000 square feet space is “small.” I figured that a supermarket chain whose concept of urban is Newton, and thinks small is 70,000 square feet wouldn’t have a clue about setting up shop in downtown Boston. I must confess I’m baffled by the appeal of these large stores. Have you ever shopped in a mega-supermarket? Inefficient, time consuming, and endless varieties of the same, dreary Pop-Tart type of items. Obviously there is something I’m not getting.

One question lingers. Do we really need another supermarket downtown? Lia Tota says yes because no one she knows shops at Whole Foods. But I checked with Charlestown and North End residents in their 40s and 50s, who said they shop regularly at Whole Foods and did not find an additional supermarket an urgent need. That doesn’t mean, though, they wouldn’t make use of one.

So let’s hope Peter Gori’s optimism is well-placed. In the best of all worlds, it will still take three years before a supermarket could open. So let’s also hope the Boston Public Market gets going on schedule. And just to make sure we have everything our hearts’ desire, let’s invite a Trader Joe’s for its good prices and quirky products. Mike Tesler said having several different kinds of grocery stores in the same area makes life better for all.

Now if only the BRA would go after a downtown elementary school with the same zest it has pursued a supermarket.

This is another one of those non-issues inflamed by the Fox News screamers, aided and abetted by half-brain people like Texas Governor Rick Perry. These people are the opposite of kind and tolerant, even if Perry muscularly claims to be “Christian,” a label that requires attributes that aren’t apparent in this man or his followers. And so what if Rhode Island’s governor, Lincoln Chaffee, used the term “holiday” tree. Trees aren’t religious. They’re pagan. Call them anything you want. (Did you know that Rhode Island got its name because the area reminded the explorer Giovanni Verrazano of Rhodes? I hadn’t known about Verrazano’s contribution to the state until I studied an older book called The Historical Atlas of the United States by Derek Hayes, which, by the way, would make a nice holiday gift for those who like maps. But I digress.)

It ought to make everyone uncomfortable to hear the folks who complain about “holiday” being used instead of Christmas. Setting one against the other has an overtone of anti-Semitism, as if Jews are ultimately responsible for what the screamers imply is an erosion of their religious celebration. And if it isn’t Jews, then it must be pandering liberals, who, by the way, comprise a number of Jews. Creepy.

As a devoted, pandering liberal, I haven’t noticed Christmas is in jeopardy. Boston Common has a very distinct crèche and a big festive Christmas tree. The radio plays Christmas music 24/7. Friends of all cultures and faiths still hold parties, as does every organization one belongs to. Christmas and other shopping doesn’t seem to have disappeared either. In fact, it appears to have saved this year’s economy. How could anyone claim it matters that Christmas trump “holiday” when the combination plays such an important part in our merchants’ health?

Christmas is kept out of the public schools, thank goodness. Would you want your kids, even if they are Christian, having to celebrate Christmas Rick Perry’s way? Now he’s trying to get his prayers in schools. Another reason not to move to Texas.

I asked several Jewish friends about their thoughts on the matter. They didn’t have many thoughts about it at all. They weren’t insulted if someone wished them a Merry Christmas. One said her family had presents and Christmas-style dinner with a disgusting Christmas pudding. They both recommended enjoying the whole thing. But maybe my friends are just nice people.

Do the screamers really think Christmas is getting watered down? Apparently they are unaware that it once stopped a war, even if the pause lasted for only a few days in 1914. The Germans and the British stopped the killing and allowed one another to bury their dead in the no-man’s land that separated the opposing troops. In some reports the soldiers on either side even talked with one another. Then they went back to shooting at one another.

It’s hard to think anyone could successfully sabotage a holiday whose celebration has come to require observers to bring a tree into the house and put baubles on it. Between the rich music, good literature, tasty food customs, and the sweet story about a babe sleeping in a manger, Christmas has done well for us. It’s not going away. And it’s a lot better than the terrors of Good Friday.

I’m thinking one way to handle all this holiday stuff is for everyone to celebrate everything. Celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa. Observe Passover, the end of Ramadan, the Japanese Ocean Day, Sukkot, the Day of the Dead and Yom Kippur. Make Easter really big, and don’t forget the Fourth of July. Life is too short to make up imagined insults.

My advice for Rick Perry and the screamers is: if you care so much about Christmas, just enjoy it. But remember to be kind and tolerant while doing it. Isn’t that the Christmas spirit?

That’s sad. Mitt seems like a good guy who has been running for public office since 1994, almost twice as long as he ran Bain Capital. We hate to see a man with a dream disappointed.

But Mitt made a regrettable decision about his affiliation early in his political career. He probably chose the Republican Party because both his parents had run for office admirably on that ticket. But children often reject their parents’ choices. When Mitt saw the direction his parents’ party was going, he should have become a Democrat. He might have had a lot more to show for his efforts than he has now.

Consider this. Mitt is stiff, polished, well-educated, lacking in humor and out of touch with the common man. Sounds like a Democrat to me.

Democrats don’t take umbrage at a Harvard education or lack of humor. Mitt fits in well with Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, two stiff, polished, well-educated men. Mike Dukakis rode the T. Some interpreted this behavior as being holier than thou. His affection for the T paradoxically showed how out of touch he was with the common man. Mitt’s out of touch too. But Democrats can handle such paradoxes.

Democrats would have welcomed Mitt’s views. He was an advocate for choice and he said gay couples were fine with him. At one point Mitt said human activity contributed to global warming. That point of view seemed to reflect his good education and good sense.

But as the Republican Party changed, Mitt was left high and dry. He had to make up stories about his beliefs. He looked less serious as his positions changed.

If he had been a Democrat, he wouldn’t have had to abandon his principles, especially in trying to weasel out of his role in passing Massachusetts’ health care law. Democrats would applaud the law and Mitt for making Massachusetts’s infant mortality rate the lowest in the nation. That’s got to be the outcome any “Christian” would praise. Moreover, because of Mitt’s mandate that everyone has to buy insurance, we no longer have to subsidize the uninsured free-loaders who went to hospitals anyway, raising costs for the rest of us. Mitt could have gotten credit.

Mitt’s Mormon ties get him in trouble with the Republican religious right. He would have had it easier as a Democrat since Democrats don’t care what your religion is or even if you have one. All Democrats care about is that you treat the poor, the unemployed, returning veterans and the disabled with compassion and a leg up. In Christianity, that’s known as the Golden Rule. Mitt’s religion probably subscribes to that notion whether or not it is Christian.

Republicans in general have a problem running for office. Since they don’t like government, it’s hard for them to explain why they want to be part of it. Mitt tries to put a good face on this, talking about smaller government and lower taxes. While he didn’t raise taxes as governor, he did raise fees—a lot. And most people think it’s nit-picking to distinguish between those things. Maybe that’s why Mitt looks anxious on television. Maybe the stress of his contradictions is the reason he talks so fast.

If Mitt were a Democrat he could be proud of running for office and spending almost 20 years doing so. Democrats believe that serving in government is patriotic. And Democrats like experienced politicians, likening them to experienced surgeons. Those are the kind you want when times are tough.

I don’t know what will happen in the Republican primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, after which the race is apparently over. But if Mitt loses, he ought to seriously consider becoming a Democrat. He’d be only 69 years of age in 2016, young enough to run again.

But it might be too late. If he had jumped ship long ago, that would have been his only flip-flop. Besides, in 2016, there’s a guy named Andrew Cuomo. How could Mitt handle an effective, appealing governor of New York if he can’t handle weirdo Newt?

I bet you’re familiar with awfulization. It’s usually associated with change, it carries exaggerated predictions of calamity, and can have the same deleterious effect on a community that it does on a person. On the other hand, it elicits permanent skepticism in people who once heard that Chicken Little claimed the sky was falling.

Let’s take as an example the casinos destined for Massachusetts. The immorality! The crime! The addiction! The loss of business for small merchants and restaurateurs! Doomsday!

Now I have to come clean. I come from a gambling family. My brother’s wife has a bookie. My father liked cards. I buy a lottery ticket a couple of times a year when the payout is high—which is, of course, the silliest time to buy a ticket since such games attract more competition. But most damning, our great-great grandfather was run out of London in the 1850s when the betting house he ran didn’t pay out after a horse race known as the Cesarewitch. He fled to frontier Illinois, where his friends, possibly not having heard of Methodists’ anti-gambling views, had immigrated. With such a heritage, I take care not to fall into hypocrisy.

Still, I predict most of us will barely see a change due to casinos. A few jobs will be created, but it won’t be a tsunami of work. A few small businesses might fold, but they might possibly have gone under anyway. Some people will have fun closer to home, but others will never see the inside of any of these facilities. I’m just hoping gamblers can get there by public transportation.

We awfulize tall buildings too. They’ll destroy life as we know it, according to their detractors. State representatives Marty Walz and Byron Rushing are pushing an anti-shadow bill that is a perfect example of awfulization. These people are two of my favorite reps, but they can be just as hysterical as anyone else.

Their bill would restrict building heights to prevent certain shadows falling on certain green spaces. The real estate community opposes the bill, but it too is probably awfulizing the financing problems it would cause. One example of the exaggerated “problem” predicted by Walz and Rushing is a Boylston Street building recently approved by the BRA. It will cast a moving shadow for an hour and a half on a small slice of Commonwealth Avenue on December 21. Spring, summer and fall? No shadows. That doesn’t seem like much of a problem to those of us who embrace December’s darkness.

Moreover, Commonwealth Avenue’s rowhouses contribute far more shadow—or shade, as we say when we want relief from the sun—than high rises near the Mass Pike. Most problematically, this bill conflicts with the laudable goal of rejoining Boston over the gash in the ground, since height pays for the extra-strength foundations buildings need over the roadway. But awfulization whips up passions, so it gets used, and the conflicts with other goals get ignored.

Think of all the changes we’ve awfulized that never came to pass. The Bunker Hill Zakim Bridge, for example. Twenty years ago people were horrified—10 lanes would create an ugly monstrosity. Now these lanes are admired, even loved, by their users.

I’m particularly fond of the awfulization of liquor licenses. Full disclosure—I once served on the board of the Beacon Hill Civic Association. But the BHCA awfulized wine and beer for many years. When they finally admitted that restaurants had better chances of succeeding if they offered such beverages, they turned their sights on mixed drinks, fighting full liquor licenses for decades. Mayhem, bedlam, brouhahas and general bad behavior were predicted, causing Charles Street to tumble into chaos, property values to plummet and residents to flee. Recently, however, restaurants that have wanted full liquor licenses have gotten them. The outcome? Nothing.

Awfulization is going on right now in Charlestown, where some people predict Armageddon-like traffic snarls within the neighborhood if Rutherford Avenue, a particularly unpleasant street, is realigned and prettied up the way some neighbors and Boston’s traffic planners want.

But experience has shown snarls rarely occur when people predict them. For example, when the Craigie Drawbridge was repaired a couple of years ago, the anticipated traffic disasters did not occur. The same for the Longfellow Bridge. One inbound lane was closed for about a year four years ago, and nothing happened.

Y2K, the swine flu—we remember the dire predictions about events like these. Such awfulizations not only impede our ability to make desirable changes, but paradoxically, they have great entertainment value. I have begun to wonder how bad the problems really are with Greece since someone revealed that the Greek economy is about the size of Connecticut’s.

The next time you hear someone predicting doom, get a grip. There is doom if you live in a war zone or famine-ravaged Somalia. But if you’re living in downtown Boston, things are not likely to descend into awfulness.

Some readers may remember that in June the city installed a mesh litter basket on the lamp post in front of our house at my request. It was an experiment. Would our sidewalk and tree pit be free of cups, crumpled paper and those little plastic bags of doggy-doo if an appropriate receptacle were available for passers-by?

The answer was a resounding yes. We provided the black trash bags that lined the litter basket and secured the bag with a big rubber band. My husband, not me, has generally emptied the bag every trash pick-up day because he is taller, and it is easier for a taller person to lift out the bag. We agreed it was a small price to pay for cleanliness. For 20 to 30 feet on either side of the litter basket, the sidewalk and the street were mercifully free of litter for the whole summer.

Neighbors became protective of the basket. They helped out, taking turns emptying the basket when we went away. A few times we went out to exchange the full bag for a fresh one and, to our surprise, some unidentified civic-minded neighbor had already done so.

As autumn began, though, things changed.  

One Sunday in September we found that someone had shoved in a pizza box too large for the basket, leaving no room for anything else. A few people then deposited their bags of doggie doo on the sidewalk for us to pick up. A few days later we found a large pair of men’s shoes taking up all the room. Then someone stuffed in household trash and a pile of magazines, something that hadn’t happened all summer.

My husband put his foot down. He objected to picking up other people’s mess. He demanded that I call the city and get them to remove the basket. I wanted to try one more time to make the litter basket work. I agreed, however, that people’s bad behavior could be too much for us.

But we learned that people will behave if they know what to do. I tackled the household trash first. The magazines had revealed the address of the culprits who stashed them in the basket. I posted a note on their door and wrote to their landlord explaining what they shouldn’t do with the litter basket. I posted a sign on the litter basket explaining that neighbors, not the city, were emptying the basket, and if users wanted the basket’s convenience, they had to treat it respectfully.

And they did.

Moreover, people left notes in plastic bags thanking us for the litter basket, and leaving their own instructions to other people about how to properly use the basket. We haven’t had a problem since. Impressed by the litter basket users’ good behavior, my husband has agreed that at least for now the basket can stay.

I developed a couple of theories in dealing with the problem. One was that the summer people knew the story about volunteers emptying the litter basket, but new residents moving in in the fall assumed the basket was a municipal service so it was okay to “abuse” the basket, as a former public works official used to put it. I can’t explain why someone would believe that making city workers clean up after them was acceptable behavior, but that seemed to be the case.

Another lesson was the value of signs. After we posted the rules for using the basket, no one has stuffed in household trash or left bags on the sidewalk for us to pick up. It is not that people aren’t slobs—some probably are. But some people just don’t understand what is appropriate behavior. If they are told what it is, they’ll behave.

Another lesson: people are desperate for litter baskets. They want some place other than the sidewalk to throw their cups, doggy-doo bags and crumpled pieces of paper. Despite the vast numbers of residents and tourists on foot, along most of downtown Boston’s residential streets the only trash containers are at playgrounds. A litter basket on a lamp post outside one’s house does clutter up the lamp post. But those doggy-doo bags I see littering the tree pits around the city are worse.