“Is this an example of your bedside manner, doctor?” - Becky, Invasion of the Body Snatchers

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

This time last year, I told you all about the time my father packed up my little brother and me and sold us to hobos because he couldn’t afford to give us a decent Christmas.  I made that story up, of course.  No one would let a man sell his children to a pack of hobos for “meat or pleasure”.  Obviously, he sold us to Cher’s backup dancers. While that might sound cruel, it was really a pretty sweet life until Cher’s career started going downhill.  I guess that was around the early ’90s.  When America suddenly woke from its stupor, looked in the mirror, and whispered, “Cher?  Really?”

But you know, it’s kind of a Christmas tradition to make stuff up.  In fact, the whole modern concept of Christmas is really based on a giant falsehood–that the reason for the season is celebrating the birth of Christ.  Now, a reasonable argument could be made that a holiday means whatever most people think it means.  Kind of like a word.  No matter how much I tell people “gay” means “happy”, they’re still going to make false assumptions about me simply because of my knee-length “Hooray to be Gay!” sweater.  Though I suppose my Eric Bana Trapper Keeper doesn’t help.

Regardless, I’m not concerned with what Christmas means now.  Mostly because whatever argument you make for the Jesus position could also be made for the “huge sales on children’s robot companions” position.  I don’t know about you, but nothing gets me in the Christmas spirit like watching my niece ride atop her 0 animatronic triceratops.

So this week, I’ll look into where Christmas really came from.  What did it mean originally?  And when will Santa finally get around to dying for our sins?

II. The Findings

Let’s face it, the Catholic Church really had a stranglehold on the whole Christian market share for a long, long time.  They still do.  Other sects and denominations can vie for power, but for the last couple of thousand years, when you said “Church”, you meant “Popedom”.  And since the official Church doctrine about Christmas was that is was the exact date of the birth of Christ, it stands to reason that this would be the tradition until well after people stopped dying of the black plague.  One of the first thinkers (or “heretics”, as the case may be) to publicly question the party line on Christmas was Sir Isaac Newton, who I’m told invented the apple.  He hypothesized that Christmas was actually a continuation of ancient celebrations of the winter solstice, since the longest night of the year also traditionally fell on December 25th.  In 1743, a German protestant named Paul Ernst Jablonski (brother of Heywood Jablonski, a famous crank letter writer) suggested that the Roman Catholics had chosen the end of December for their birthday celebration to coincide with the Roman holiday Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, which was set up by the emperor Aurelian to (and I’m not making this up) worship the sun god Sol Invictus, which Aurelian made up.

In truth, our modern Christmas traditions come from a variety of sources.  It’s true that ancient people around the world traditionally got their non-electric boogaloos on around the winter solstice.  Being a dead season, winter meant less work in the fields, which is always cause for celebration.  Plus, in the days before central heating, getting drunk and collapsing in a pile on the mead hall floor was an effectively dirty way to keep warm.  The Yule log came from Germanic winter festivals, and those fair-haired, hell-bound pagans in Scandinavia called the whole festival season Jul.  So instead of harking the herald angels this yuletide, it might be more appropriate to don a horned helmet and pillage something.  Or whatever the hell ancient Scandinavians did with their time.

And when it comes to robot dinosaurs, we have the Romans to thank.  No, they weren’t experts in robotics, although I’m sure there’s a hack sci-fi writer dusting off his word processor right now.  But they did saddle us with the burden that is December gift giving.  The tradition comes from the holiday of Saturnalia, which celebrated the dedication of the temple of Saturn and lasted until December 23rd.  This is why I give everyone I know the same Christmas present: a Styrofoam ball with pipecleaner rings around it.  Also, I’m cheap.

And really, it’s no wonder that so many disparate traditions were put through the Play-Doh Fun Factory of time and ended up the wadded mess of nonsense we celebrate and/or ignore today.  Part of the successful strategy of the Roman Empire was to adopt a sort of live and let live attitude, especially in the far-flung frontiers of its rule such as northern Europe.  It’s hard to govern any sizeable mass of land without it devolving into idiotic chaos (see: Texas), so keeping tabs on the largest single empire the world had known was pretty tough.  Instead of forcing an oppressive new regime on the newly conquered, the Romans allowed native cultures to keep their traditional parties, festivals, and poetry slams as-is for the most part.  As long as they paid their taxes, they were left alone.  So when Christianity swept across Rome like the flu virus, these pagans were allowed to keep their logs and mistletoe and drunken orgies as long as they put a little Christian twist on them.  Before you pass out from too much disgusting egg nog, make a toast to the baby Jesus, and everything is forgiven.

III. The Conclusion

Personally, I don’t believe Christ’s birth ever happened.  Mostly because there isn’t any evidence that it did.  But even if I’m wrong, I hope we never find out when the real birthday is.  I couldn’t imagine Christmas at any other time of year (except maybe July, when I’m looking for a deal on a used car or a mattress).  Think about it: no more hot cocoa.  No more fuzzy sweaters with nine volt battery pouches and blinking reindeer eyes.  No more plastic surgery after standing out by the river waiting for fireworks in the dead of night and losing the tip of your nose to frostbite.

Wait, this isn’t sounding so bad after all.

Huh?  No more robot dinosaurs, you say?  Well screw all that then.  Merry Christmas, everyone.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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