It is a canard, a hard to kill outrageous lie, that Christmas “became” materialistic.

Christmas is just the latest name for a Winter Solstice blowout of excess that stretches out unnumbered millennium prior to the birth of Christ; back to when agrarian societies first formed.  The harvest was finished, the chores were few, the first beer of the season was ready, and there was much grain and meat that must be eaten or go to rot.

“The Night Before Christmas” was a damnable fable

Here was a party that did not need an excuse!  Toss over the conventions of society and put the lord of misrule in charge if only for a few weeks before the hard cold settles in and the supplies of fatted calf run out.

As long as there has been this festival of excess, the establishment has tried to kill it; they’ve tried to tame it; but the Spirit of Saturnalia survives, yes even thrives, to this day.

“The Night Before Christmas” was a damnable fable written up on the orders of a PR cabal looking to tame the drunken, fornicating, and gluttonous lower classes of New York City. Clement Moore’s aim was to shame the rabble off the  street;  make them spend the day at home with their family; and quit ringing his doorbell demanding an offering of  food, drink, or money in exchange for a badly sung carol.

He injected guilt into the celebration by making it “for the children”. (Anytime you hear that phrase, know that those afflicted with overly tight sphincters are out to take something from you.)

Docile sheep that we are before the gods of Mass Communication, Americans have conformed to the point that we now call the natural holiday a “perversion” of the “true” holiday when in fact it is the other way around.

Try as he might, Moore could not keep a good holiday down. He was unable to kill our drunken parties, our pig-outs, and our fixation on sex. Bacchus absorbed his quiet day at home and transformed that into an orgy of gift giving, eating, drinking and, in the finer redneck homes, beating up the in-laws after lunch.

All Moore can lay claim to is making us feel guilty about it.  You’d think he was a Baptist Minister instead of an Episcopal Clergyman.

As a humorist and social iconoclast, I thank my lucky Bacchus that we have been able to keep the holiday as it was meant to be — a glorious, squalid, bacchanal that, done right, stretches from Thanksgiving Day all the way to January 6th.

Once “the day” is over, it is fashionable to complain about it. I am tempted to give a late Christmas gift to the next moaner — a tube of K-Y Jelly to loosen up their painfully tight sphincter.

We still have until January 6th!  Have a  Merry Christmas, a Ripping Good Saturnalia, and a Happy New Year!

Credit where due. This rant began its life as a comment on the Sanity on Edge Blog following someone uttering the standard complaint about Christmas materialism. After about 200 words, I realized that I had something suitable for posting and, selfish charlatan that I am, I cutnpasted it over to here and deleted it off her blog. Sorry ettarose!

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With a,b,c, and even d list celebrities dying at the rate of a few per week, I have decided to take advantage of the “wisdom of crowds” to see if we can work out the next one to die.  A poll is below.  You can vote on the people listed there or just add your own.  If you wish to make speculations or lay claim to being the person to place a new celebtodie on the list, just go for the comment link.

I’ll check in from time to time to see how we’re doing.  After the initial run as a post, this section will move to the top menu on the blog.

7/2/09 13:46 So I finish this post in the middle of the night and wake up to find Karl Malden dead. He’s not even on the list!

I am now tracking Celebrity Deaths from a really twisted website Celebrity Beeper that sends you e-mails when someone famous dies. Here is a partial list of the last week:

• 6/23 Ed Mcmahon
• 6/25 Michael Jackson
• 6/25 Farrah Fawcett
• 6/28 Billy Mays
• 6/28 Gale Storm
• 6/29 Fred Travalena
• 7/1 Karl Malden

Gay Marriage: You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.

People who crossed the country to get to Massachusetts or New Hampshire to be Gaily Married did not stay in Massachusetts or New Hampshire: they went home. Home where Gay Marriage does not exist and where the legal machinery required for Gay Divorce does not exist, either.

The unhappily married couple has to go back to Massachusetts or New Hampshire and establish residency before they can be divorced. Does this sound like a new reality show or what? Set it in a boarding house for divorcing gay people and call it “Separate Beds and Breakfasts”. If I see this on Bravo next season, they’ll hear from me.

Even if our gay couple live in a state where they can get divorced, the IRS tax codes do not recognize Gay Marriage. They will tax all property division; so whoever scores more stuff also pays more taxes. It takes a Government to spoil the age old practice of “marrying up”.

On top of the opprobrium in certain quarters for Gay Marriage comes the general, centuries old, stigma of divorce.  If you thought that Evangelical Churches were all against Gay Marriage you ain’t seen nothing yet. They are really, really, really, against divorce. As it says in Matthew 19:2: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder”, or woman either. If Adam and Steve do manage to get married by a priest or preacher in the name of the Holy Trinity, then they better damn well stay married. If this seems illogical to you, then you don’t understand your conservative religions.

Couples getting divorced in these churches are often shunned by the congregation. There is nothing for them to do but quit their current Evangelical Church and go join two different Evangelical Churches. The new churches will welcome them to the Singles Programs they run to help people deal with divorce. It’s open to everyone who was divorced elsewhere.

Evangelical Churches are not the only places who do not support Gay Divorce. There is a funny video on YouTube where a guy walks around the Castro section of San Francisco asking people to sign a petition to support Gay Divorce. No one signs. Not even the gay people. Are you for divorce? Of course you are not — no one is.

Politicians don’t willingly vote for things that most people HATE. If it took from the 1950’s to the 1970’s to liberalize the divorce laws in this country for Heterosexual marriages, what kind of time line are we looking at for Gay Divorces?

I was about to say, thank God no children are hurt when I realized that the latest fad is to marry gay and then adopt a child. There are no laws for Gay Marriage Custody, either.  Not only does Heather Have Two Mommies,  she also has a drinking problem because her mommies hate each other, can’t get divorced, and can’t get a court to agree to custody.

The messy and very human process of realigning every law in fifty states will be with us for a while.  There is an opportunity here.  I think that my former hometown of Remerton, GA should pass some laws on Gay Divorce and become the Gay Divorce Capital of the South. They are needing a new business model anyway.

I’ll be wearing blue for St Patrick’s Day, just to be authentic.

Blue, you see, is the official color of Saint Patrick.  He explained the Holy Trinity to pre-Christian Irish by using the three leaves of the shamrock.  The phrase “the wearing of the green” comes from wearing a shamrock as a sign of protest to show you were Catholic during the Protestant reign of Great Britain.  Nowadays if you are a Protestant in the North you wear orange on March 17th in Protest of the Catholic Church.

But St. Patrick liked blue.

You can cover all three bases by wearing green, orange, and blue.  Or you can just puke on yourself, which is what many will do on St. Patrick’s Day, anyway.

When the British Parliament made St. Patrick’s Day an official banking holiday in 1907, part of the legislation called for the pubs to be closed on March 17th.  Some say this caused the second Irish emigration to New York. The Irish did without until a change of law in the 1970’s.

St. Patrick is one of three patron saints of Ireland. The other three being Brigid of Kildare and St Columba.

Being a nun, Brigid was rather frigid and a wet blanket at parties.  St Columba, on the other hand, was a brawler in the best Irish tradition. When St Finnian refused to let St Columba have a psalter (a book of psalms) that Columba had copied by hand, the fight escalated and was not settled until many died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhner.  Columba was exiled to Scotland. Saint Finnian became a saint. Who do YOU think won?

We don’t know when Patrick was born, where exactly in Ireland his mission was, or how he died. In fact, all we have are two letters of his.  In one letter he is defending himself against charges of financial perfidy.  St Patrick refused to take bribes from Kings so they used that as a basis to accuse him of being a thief. Logic is not a strong point in Ireland.

In the other letter, he announces that he has excommunicated certain Brythonic warriors of Coroticu for pillage, rape, and murder.  He did this after they had fled the country: which made it easy for everyone else to shun them.

Patrick did not literally run all the snakes out of Ireland because, according to the fossil evidence, there were no snakes on the island as they had all been crushed by the glaciers in the last Ice Age.  The snake was the symbol for the Druids and Patrick was in the business of converting Druids to Christianity.  More specifically, he had a knack for getting rich Druid females to start nunneries depriving rich Male Druids of places to put their snakes.

This was all foretold in a prophesy of the Druids:

Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: “so be it, so be it.

Druid poetry, you see, is an oxymoron.

We don’t know where Patrick is buried.  There is good reason for this.  When he died a gigantic tug of war called “Battle for the Body” almost happened.  I say almost because the Lord sent a flood to separate the armies and then fooled both of them into thinking they were walking off with the body. Who knows, maybe Patrick got left on the riverbank to provide fertilizer for clover.  Wearing the green, so to speak.

So, for St Patrick’s Day, I will wear blue and have a “bit of the green” on my collar, but no orange. Like all the Druids bellying up to the bar, I’m going to pretend to be Irish Catholic for the day.

If someone sends you an e-mail and asks you to write down 25 things about yourself and then pass that along to twenty-five of your friends with the requirement that they do the same: how long before everyone is “it” and wishing you’d go maim yourself?

Not long.  I did the math.  If everyone obeys like a trained chihuahua, the graphic below shows the exponential growth of passing the itness along to your erstwhile friends.

25
625
15,625
390,625
9,765,625
244,140,625
6,103,515,625
152,587,890,625
3,814,697,265,625

By the fifth generation (noted in red) nearly the entire population of Facebook has been tagged.  If you are on Facebook, you’ve probably been tagged multiple times already as this thing is growing faster than mold.

Bark! Bark! Good boy! Write those 25 things again won’t you?

By the seventh generation (in green), every living human on the planet is involved.  We don’t know the exact numbers, but I think the entire Galaxy cuts in around the ninth generation.

A prediction – this won’t happen.  We won’t see aborigines in Australia busily scratching out 25 things about themselves on 25 mud tablets so that they can toss them at 25 of their friends.  We won’t because people are ornery cusses and most of them hate to write anything since they escaped from the clutches of English teachers long ago.

Seeing that this so called “meme” has been replicating like a virus, I think it is time for a mutation in its RNA:

• Everyone who is reading this is now charged with not wearing underwear tomorrow.
• You must then send an e-mail to 25 friends telling them what you did and charging them to do the same.
• In your email, you should tell them that this chain has already gone around the world 10 times and that people who do not fall in line will die, someday.
• They will fall in or out of love, eventually.
• and all their children will be born naked.

No, you do not have to walk around all day telling everyone you are freeballing (or freebuffing depending on gender), or making jokes about Commandos, or even singing this silly song from the play Avenue Q:

I’m not wearing underwear today,
No im not wearing underwear today
Not that you probably care
Much about my underwear
Still none the less i gotta say
That im not wearing underwear today

Just simply go without underwear. If you are an aborigine, wear some.