On this December 26th, I want to wish all of you and yours a Merry Christmas!
“But wait,” you say, “surely the made-up1 birthday of Jesus is on December 25th, not December 26th?”
Well, as anyone who has eagerly run out to check the mailbox for the first issue of Some Funnily Embarrassing Magazine I Got Given A Subscription Of For Christmas can tell you, the mail is not being delivered today. A quick check of The USPS Calendar will tell you that this year, Christmas Day is on December 26th, so your Christmas subscription will have to wait another day2.
1) As I have been told my entire life that there is “historical evidence” which corroborates the Bibles already historically accurate opinion that Jesus Christ was an actual person, it seems one could simply look up the actual date of Christ’s birth, thus doing away with this whole President’s Day style made-up holiday3.
2) Imagine my surprise to learn that magazine subscriptions take 4-6 weeks of processing before delivery of the first issue. I guess that’s understandable, but the extra day the USPS is tacking on is ridiculous.
3) If anyone were to ask me, which they never do, I would tell them that I think Christmas might work better as a “floating holiday”, one which, for example, might always take place on the last Sunday in December4. Since everyone agrees that the actual date is a made-up one anyway, this would make a lot more sense than just letting Church-and-State-separated government bodies who wish to celebrate this particular religious holiday anyway go changing the date willy-nilly5.
4) Of course, this would be counter to the efforts early Christians made to “embrace and extend” the holiday that was observed prior to the acceptance of Christianity, and thus “Anti-Christian”, so I don’t see that happening any time soon.
5) Did you know that “willy-nilly” doesn’t mean what you think it means? Look it up to see whether I’ve used it correctly or not6.
6) Boy do I love a good nested footnote. I think this is a new record for footnote nesting on my part, getting me one step closer to the convoluted footnoting in the excellent book House of Leaves, which is amazing in the level of twisty writing Mark Z. Danielewski7 employed during its writing.
7) He is of couse, the musician Poe’s brother8.
8) Her name is Annie Danielewski9.
9) I think.
