Apathy Sketchpad

Christmas is a very strange festival. For a start, it’s in the wrong month. Jesus was not born on December 25th. Many people will tell you that the date was chosen arbitrarily. Many people are wrong. By an astonishing coincidence, they are the same people. It’s all political, really. Anyone who knows the nativity story ought to be able to tell you that we ought know to within a fortnight or so when Jesus was born, because there was a census the following week, although in fact there wasn’t. He was far more likely (though not actually very likely) to have been born in April of 4BCE*. The date in December was chosen purely to try to squash the Pagan festival which is being celebrated this weekend by more people than you’d probably imagine.

For a start, there’s all the Pagans. Then, there’s everybody else. The use of holly and ivy is a Pagan tradition, not a Christian one, as is all the mistletoe. In retrospect, it should be obvious that it takes a Pagan to hang poison on his wall while celebrating something. The number of church newsletters that have clip-art holly leaves on them this week and are totally unaware of their Pagan roots is really rather amusing. And if you receive a card this year which refers to Christmas as Yule, you know is has either come from someone who thinks the terms are synonymous, or from a practicing Pagan.

Ironically, the term that people will most adamantly deny is synonymous with Christmas is ‘Xmas’. They claim that replacing Christ with an X, the mathematical symbol for ‘anything’, is heathen. This almost sounds reasonable, but the polite thing to do would have been to check first. The X in Xmas is from the Greek letter chi: Χ, or χ in lower case (the Greek word for Christ is Xristos). Yes, I know it looks exactly like an X, but it’s a chi. That’s why the English version uses an X.

And now, as a special Christmas Miracle: The Story Of The Christmas Tree.

There are two ways to tell this story. I shall start with the nice version, because once you hear the stupid version it is much harder to hear the nice version ever again without laughing. The nice version is that a group of Germanic Druids believed, arguably slightly stupidly, that the great old oak trees could not be felled. Knowing this, someone decided to prove them wrong, so he felled one. It crushed everything it fel on, shrubs, trees, bushes, everything except for one lone sapling. This fir sapling was seen to be blessed, or a Sign, or something. That was the first Christmas tree.

The stupid version is that someone tried to stop a group of Germans idolating oak trees and succeeded only in making most of the world idolate fir trees.

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*Some people, offended that we date everything relative to the birth of Jesus, created an alternative to the BC and AD system of years. They used the phrases BCE and CE (for Before Common Era and Common Era) to signify exactly the same things. This is an extremely silly system created by people who were just looking for something new to suck the fun out of, but I use it here anyway because I felt a little silly myself almost claiming Jesus was born four years before Jesus was born.