MY KIND OF ADVENT CALENDAR
1) “Jingle bells” was composed in 1857 as a Thanksgiving song
2) Gift giving at Christmas was banned by the Catholic Church for being a pagan practise
3) Holiday cheer is a hoax used to try to prevent you from noticing that suicide and murder rates skyrocket during this most joyous and festive season of the year
4) December has the largest number of food poisoning incidents of any month
5) The nativity accounts of the gospels of Luke and Matthew make no mention of a day or even season for the birth of Jesus 6) Jesus, if such a being existed, was certainly Jewish and most likely born not in December but somewhere in the middle of the year. But even what year is highly debatable. Google that yo!
7) There was no “star” of Bethlehem: it was a comet
8) Nowhere in the Bible does it talk about three wise men. Nor is there mention of a camel. Those that are reported to have visited travelled at most ten kilometers
9) Not even the Pope thinks there were animals present at Jesus’ birth, so your cute nativity scene is all wrong
10) Killing a tree and then bringing it into your home to watch it die is lunacy, especially in the twenty-first century
11) Combining petroleum with chemical pigments and extruding the resulting toxic slurry into something that resembles a living tree to avoid the aforementioned lunacy is only crazier still
12) Christmas is not a celebration or a holiday it’s a year-end retail period
13) The image we in North America know as Santa Claus was popularized by Coca Cola in the 1930s to sell soft drinks
14) The first known image of Santa Claus has him as a fat Dutch sailor smoking a pipe and wearing a green winter coat
15) Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of murderers, thieves, pirates, embalmers, oil merchants, bankers, pawnbrokers, prostitutes, and shipwreck victims. HO HO HO!
16) In German folklore Saint Nicholas is accompanied by Krampus – a demonic hairy beast with cloven feet, horns, and a serpent-like tongue – who steals away and eats all the naughty children
17) Sorry, tryptophan doesn’t act on the brain unless it’s taken in the absence of other food. Taken with protein, like that found in turkey, tryptophan is completely neutralized. Moreover, there’s the same amount of tryptophan in beef and tofu as there is in turkey; and, further still, the amount consumed at even the largest Christmas dinner is far too small to have any noticeable impact on the human nervous system. (So get off the couch and get over there and wash the dishes you lazy bastard!)
18) Gift giving is about reciprocity, not generosity. Watch what happens if you don’t give someone a gift. Surprise! You don’t get one in return
19) It’s not uncommon for people to take on more debt than they can handle at Christmas – and for those people to spend the entire following year paying off their debt – only to do the same next Christmas
20) Can Christmas be viewed as anything but a global conspiracy in which adults encourage one another to lie to children, and for no good reason at all? (And it’s no simple little lie either, no, it’s an elaborate series of colossal lies...)
21) The same adults who children count on to provide them with reliable information about the world are the same ones who introduce them to Santa. His existence is affirmed by other trusted adults, friends, and even news reporters, books, television, and film. His existence is further validated by hard evidence: the partially eaten cookies, the empty glasses of milk. We do all this then complain about our gullible, scientifically illiterate population
22) “You got me ... a tin of ... shoe polish. Uhh-mazing! Just what I needed. Thank you so much!”
23) Killing two hundred million turkeys, cows, and pigs for one silly meal is totally cool, but leaving one dog in a car for an hour in June is criminal, worthy of fines and jail time, and causes Twitter to virtually explode?
24) What’s that? It comes with a humourless joke, a silly tissue paper hat that doesn’t fit anyone, a cracker that fails much of the time, and a toy so sad that even a destitute child would cast it aside? I’ll take two dozen!
25) In ancient Rome, December 25th was a pagan celebration called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“The Birthday of the Invincible Sun”) – where, at the Winter solstice, the sun dips to its lowest point on the horizon, “dying” for three days, before being miraculously “resurrected”. Around 321CE Roman Emperor Constantine I instructed Christians and non-Christians alike to be united in adopting December 25th as the focus of their calendar year. Jesus, if such a being existed, was most definitely not born on the 25th of December
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