The Winter Solstice
Holiday happiness fills my nostrils and triggers my brain stem all aquiver as the snowplows do their best to ensure safe passage for the daily commute of the scheduled masses and those few lucky wayward travelers in their midst. Sugary cookies and midget exploitation mark the celebration of the theft of the celebration of the Winter Solstice by the Romans, transforming it into the festival it is today, the great recognition of the wedding of the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus. Or so the story goes…
The tale of Christmas is simultaneously as old as time and younger than present time. It was in the year 2010, give or take a dozen or so years, that American corporations, realizing a need to increase profits at the end of the calendar year, hired a team of scientists to travel back in time and, using stem cell research, implant a young woman by the name of Mary with a sperm nay, a supersperm completely devoid of any genetic malformities and enhanced with non-soluble, water repellent feet, cell dividing, bread breaking fingers, and Lasek eye surgery palms. This supersperm in turn allowed Mary to conceive and birth the most genetically accurate child ever, later known as Jesus H. Christ.
This great man went on to cure the sick, help the poor, rub the feet, and conquer the moon. Ironically, two thousand years later, it would be in his name that President George W. Bush would outlaw stem-cell research and nearly make the past and present impossible in the same act. Luckily, science fiction writers had so diluted the American people’s notion of what can or cannot happen in time travel, that all was forgotten and the eggnog did flow. And flow it did, so heavily that it carved a giant scar into the knee of Paul Bunyan, and as he was without decent medical insurance, he could not afford to have adequate surgery, giving us the Grand Canyon as we know it today.
I encourage all of you to remember the sacrifices of all of the brave men (and one woman) who made Christmas the festival it is today: Jonah & the Whale (who invented the submarine sandwich, later reformed into a glazed ham), Tony Danza (for his epic portrayal as “the Boss” as Santa Claus), and Budweiser (who invented the clydesdale, without which Santa would never be able to drink enough beer to convince himself that stuffing children’s socks with toothbrushes and Yu-Gi-Oh cards would be a good idea).
Up Next: A Verbose Recanting of the Due Process of Seasonality