Darko Gacov

Europe is aging, and aging fast. Twenty million workers will leave the workforce between now and 2050 and more than one-third of the population will be over 65, creating labor shortages, pension havoc and other less easily quantifiable measures of social change like little innovation and an aversion to change.

'This is a process without parallel in the history of humanity,' said a United Nations Report published earlier this year, predicting that world wide people older than 60 would outnumber those under 15 in 2047 for the first time.

Researchers described the ability to resolve the demographic crisis as 'the defining issue' for Europe's future.

Christmas in Orthodox Macedonia is on Jan. 7th, 14 days later than most others celebrates. This is a mixed blessing. The upside, especially if you are a student in a foreign country, is that you get to celebrate twice. The downside is that it makes you different. But being different is not always a bad thing, because in Macedonia we don't have the shopping hype and chaos, at least not for Christmas. We value the New Year more and exchange our presents then. At our Christmas -- celebrated on what is the feast of Epiphany in the Christian West in honor of the visit of the Three Kings -- the importance is placed on the 6th of January rather than on the 7th.