Strata of Thought: Christmas special

"Mary's boy child, Jesus Christ, was born on Christmas Day
and man will live for evermore because of Christmas Day"

Boney M: "Mary's Boy Child"

There are three things wrong with the above lyric. First and most glaringly of all, it demonstrates that you can't use the same damn word in place of a rhyming word in a song and make it work. Second, if we want to get into Christian theology (I do), the gospel actually points towards Jesus' death as being the reason everyone will be saved, not the fact he was born -his self-sacrifice is supposedly on behalf of the entire human race. Third and last of all, Jesus was not born on the 25th of December, Christmas Day, as implied here. I remember once at school, when we were in a special Christmas assembly, a boy asked our headteacher whether Christmas would have been in September if Jesus had been born then. He said it would.

He was either lying, ignorant of the origins of Christmas, or just unwilling to confuse us all. One extremely boring web-page suggests September 11th as his birthday, as it happens, and claims to derive this information from astronomical data. Outside of extremely shaky gospel assertions, I'd say it's impossible to tell when he was born, who he was or why he was executed in the 1st century AD. So why do we hold Christ's Mass when we do?

Like saints, sacred places and other customs, the first Christians stole important calendar events (the other big one being Easter, a pre-existing pagan tradition). December was not only the most important month of the year for Romans, who celebrated Saturnalia in a week around the 17th, but also the Celtic/Germanic tribes who observed the midwinter soltice. Where better to slap the feast-day of your most important religious figure? And it's not a big a leap as you'd think -after all, from the very early 4th century most emperors were Christian, not pagan, and had enough authority to make such a transition happen.

So, happy Saturnalia/Yule to you.

As for this week's Sunday Song, my thoughts consisted of a consideration of traditionally Christmas music: religious, uplifting, family oriented, happy, wintery. Tunes of the same calibre as Slade's 'Merry Xmas Everybody', Wizzard's 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday', or Wham's 'Last Christmas'. Yeah.

So naturally I chose something irreligious, anarchic, mad and summer-y, Led Zeppelin's 'Rock N' Roll'.


I really don't have anything to say about this song except that it's three and a half minutes of burning guitars and blazing drums, and about as much fun as riding the bomb in Dr Strangelove. The perfect Christmas antidote, I think.