It's rare that a trip to the Post Office evokes feelings of patriotism.
Its even more rare during the busy holiday season.
But New Hampshire writer Lois Shea left her post office recently with a new appreciation for her country.
I stopped to buy stamps the other day, in a tiny
white-clapboard-and-birch town of mostly white, mostly Protestant people in Central New Hampshire.
The post office had Christmas stamps: the religious kind, with the Madonna and child; and the non-religious kind, with grinning snowmen.
They also had Hanukkah stamps.
And Kwanzaa stamps.
And they had stamps commemorating the Muslim celebration ending Ramadan.
God bless the United States of America.
Four different religious traditions get equal billing, and nobody holds a riot in the street about it.
These stamps celebrate the original American Dream, don't they? The right to worship free of persecution, free of fear.
I decided it would be downright patriotic to buy some of each.
The Postal Service's statement seemed not only an act of grace and of strength, but also of defiance:
In the face of narrow-minded religious hatred, we will shout even louder our belief in religious and cultural tolerance.
We will shout from rooftops and post offices from New York to Washington to New Hampshire.
Not long after airplanes smashed into one of our last illusions, New Hampshire attorney general Philip McLaughlin, law enforcement, city officials and religious leaders went to a mosque in Manchester to meet with New Hampshire Muslims.
McLaughlin is an Irish-American Catholic who was raised in Nashua.
His native culture could not be more different from the one he was about to step into.
New Hampshire's top law enforcement official went to that mosque offering not unfounded suspicion, but equal protection; seeking not apology, but collaboration.
Some may have expected McLaughlin to approach that forum with a measure of unease.
It's not something he talks about much, but two of McLaughlin's sons, both United States Marines, were working at the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into it.
McLaughlin got a call right away from his son Tim, who had just left for a morning run when the plane hit. Tim was okay, but Matt was still inside. Tim told his father he was going in to find Matt.
Then he hung up.
For nearly four hours, McLaughlin heard from neither of them.
At 1:30 that afternoon, he finally got the call that both were safe.
Thankfully, this father's worst fears were not realized.
Now, at the mosque in Manchester, a woman stood up.
She was afraid, she said.
She was afraid to go to the grocery store.
Afraid her neighbors would aim their anger at her;
Afraid her fellow Americans would target her for revenge.
Her fears, sadly, were not entirely unfounded.
Americans don't always live up to our own ideals.
Assistant AG Mary Schwarzer talked to the women.
Then she went to her boss with a suggestion.
Schwarzer would organize assistant attorneys general to be on-call - as volunteers - to escort these women to the grocery store.
A veiled Muslim woman may seem a vulnerable target to some dummy bent on revenge.
She would seem less so with an assistant attorney general at her side.
McLaughlin agreed.
He handed out his phone number, and told people that anyone who was afraid to go grocery shopping should call the attorney general's office.
He would see to it that they would be escorted by a member of his staff.
That story has been told as far away as Pakistan.
Americans have related it back to friends and relatives in the old country: "Who would do this for you in Pakistan?" they have asked. "This is why I love my country."
It's one reason why I love my country, too.
The stamps on my Christmas cards represent four very different religious traditions.
But every stamp is embossed with the same three letters: U.S.A.
And so the cards will go out this year, landing in mailboxes from Center Sandwich to Chicago; from New York to Montreal to Pasadena.
And each will go bearing a tiny flag -- of faith.
