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Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t the holiday season seem nothing more than an annual excuse to get drunk, buy lots of gifts for people you don’t feel like buying gifts for, and most importantly, get a bunch of stuff that you don’t really need but were too cheap to go buy for yourself? It’s a capitalistic orgy, an orgasmic rolling in our own troughs of excess.

I know that this season is supposedly based on the birth of Jesus and that years ago, in an age long-forgotten and caked with dust, the majority of people actually took the religious component of Christmas seriously. But who takes it seriously these days? You get your ‘Christmas Christians’, who haul their suits out of the plastic wrappers once a year to go sit in the back of the Church and pretend they give a damn, as well as the folks who talk about how much they’re into the goodwill of the season while sidestepping the Salvation Army bucket on their way to the checkout, a few hundred dollars worth of goods tucked under their arms to give to their spoiled, ungrateful brats.

(And the trees! My god, every year they go out and massacre hundreds of thousands of innocent trees and charge $40 a piece for ‘em, so we can dress them up like cheap, painted whores, and then, after the holiday has passed and our loot has been assimilated into our bulging coffers, we chuck ‘em out with the trash. Buy an artificial one and you can keep it forever. “But it has to be real!” you say. No, you just think it does. Go get a fake and buy some of that tree fragrance they sell at Walmart or something. Or better yet, take a walk in the woods and enjoy the company of hundreds of real, living, oxygen-dispensing trees.)

But now Jesus is that face in the window, peering in at us from out in the cold while we roast chestnuts and drink rum-spiked eggnog (after a few of those you just might see Christ in the window). I think it was jolly St. Nick who pushed Jesus out of the way for Christmas supremacy. After all, it’s Santa we see selling us everything from car batteries to soap dispensers, and according to the folks at Coca Cola, it’s their beverage that the Fat Man likes to suck back. No wonder he is an overweight diabetic. How many little kids go to bed hoping that Jesus shows up the next day? And if he did, he’d damn well better have that Sony Playstation tucked under his robe somewhere.

With the ever-changing face of society we see more religious and cultural practices edging into what used to be primarily Christian territory. We have Ramadan, Hannukah, Kwanzaa all jostling for a bit of the holiday limelight. And some Christians are getting a bit upset, thinking that the December holidays are sacred to them and that all this hullabaloo is diluting the reverence of their celebrations.

But Christmas was around for several hundred years before the birth of Jesus. In fact, they can date similar pagan traditions going back almost 4,000 years before the famous virginal birth (which was itself borrowed from pagan legends—but let’s not go there today). Early Europeans began traditions like the Yule log while celebrating the winter solstice from December 21 through to January, and parades, feasts, and gift giving were common at this time of year in ancient Mesopotamian societies as well.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia during the solstice period, which in typical Roman fashion was a hedonistic time filled with wine, large feasts and most likely an orgy or two. The birth of Mithra, a Roman god, was celebrated on December 25, which Pope Julius I later declared to be the birthdate of Jesus. However, he didn’t make this declaration until almost 400 years after the crucifixion, and was believed to have chosen that day to coincide with the Saturnalia celebrations (the Bible makes no mention of the year or month Jesus was born). So actually it was the Christians who “borrowed” the December 25 holiday in the first place.

There’s plenty of room for everyone to celebrate in their own way, as we’re all pretty much borrowing from the same ancient and common traditions. There’s no monopoly on Christmas, even if  ‘Christ’ is in the name.  We all want to spend time with family and friends, we all want to get shitfaced and enjoy a break from work, and if only for a week or two we seem to want to make the world a better place by helping with charity work, giving donations, buying gifts for the poor, etc. The name isn’t important.

But the gifts sure as hell are! Load up that cart, baby!

And before I forget, merry ‘Mas everybody!