Men in Cages: I'm Going to Get a Lump of Coal for This One . . .

Let's face facts: holidays are pretty ridiculous.  They're ridiculously good in that they get us a day off from work.  They're ridiculously fattening in that they involve substantial feasting.  And they're ridiculously ridiculous in that our reasons for celebrating them are completely absurd.

All major Christian holidays are based on a series of highly questionable premises.  And I'm not talking about just one or two weird premises either.  By my count, there are seven ridiculous premises one must accept in order to justify the celebration of Christmas and Easter.

1.) Once upon a time, a virgin named Mary gave birth.

I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: virgins can’t give birth.  A virgin giving birth isn’t “a miracle;” it’s an impossibility.  (I mean, yes, as YM frequently reminds its readership, if a guy jizzes all over a woman’s nether-regions, even if he doesn’t penetrate, there does exist the potential that the woman will get pregnant.  But this doesn’t happen a lot.  And, let’s be frank, girls who won’t put out, but will let guys jizz all over their nether-regions aren’t called virgins; they’re called freaks.)

Anyway, I don’t really think Mary was a virgin.  I think she was either a.) a liar, or b.) raped.  I personally lean toward choice b.  I’ve seen pictures of Joseph.  (They didn’t have cameras back then, but Joseph frequently posed for portraits.)  And, I won’t lie to you; Joseph looks like precisely the sort of guy who would slip a tranquilizer into his prude wife’s drink and then bang her while she was out cold.  Oh come on.  You know the type of guy I’m talking about . . . 

2.) The child she birthed was actually the son of God. 

This is completely absurd.  But I can totally comprehend why people believed it.  Joseph obviously knew he was fucked when Mary got pregnant.  He had to come up with a good lie, and fast.  So he probably told Mary, “Well, uh, it can’t be mine, since I respect your purity and greatly enjoy leading a chaste life . . . I know!  Maybe the Lord planted his genetic material within you.  Yeah – crazy, I know.  But God’s been known to work in mysterious ways.  Remember that time He made it rain locusts? Dude’s fucking nuts!”

I’m sure Mary was hesitant to believe Joseph’s ramblings at first.  But she’d been “The Virgin Mary” all her life.  She knew that if she didn’t defend her honor, she’d be at risk of getting a new nickname that focused on one of her less positive attributes (like “The Nappy-Haired Mary” or “The Borderline Mentally Retarded Mary”).  Joseph’s story gave her an easy out when people were like, “Uh, Virgin Mary, looks like you ain’t all that virginal any more,” so she went with it.

And even if Mary remained skeptical about this story throughout her pregnancy, have you ever seen a mother with her infant?  Every mother thinks their baby is the single greatest thing ever to grace the earth.  If you rounded up 100 new mothers and told each of them that their kid was the next coming of Christ, I bet at least 97 of them would say, “You are SO right!”  (And the remaining three would probably be Jews or Muslims or something.)

3.) This son’s number one priority in life was talking about how extremely cool his dad was. 

Listen, I think my dad’s alright and all.  In fact, I dare say, my dad’s pretty darn dad-tastic.  But during my teenage years, you better believe that I regularly accused my father of being unfair . . . And uncaring . . . And embarrassing to be seen with in public. 

Nobody extols their dad’s virtues when they’re 17.  Dad’s the one setting the curfew, limiting car usage, forcing you to mow the lawn before you go to the mall, and refusing to let you get an awesome dolphin tattoo.  Now, Jesus probably didn’t have these exact problems.  (For example, I know for a fact that Jesus never argued with God over whether or not he could get a tatt.  God was totally down with his son having ink; such was the norm back in biblical times.)  But I still don’t understand how he would possibly think it acceptable to be so pressed for his father.  Maybe Jesus just never matured out of that stage of fatherly adoration occupied by five year-olds.  Or maybe Jesus said stuff like, “Praise God!” facetiously, but no one got the joke because the people of Bethlehem weren’t all that hip to sarcasm.   

4.) Lots of people thought this guy who was totally obsessed with his dad was hella awesome.

As I stated above, I consider it implausible that a guy would devote a huge amount of his time to praising his father.  I consider it even more implausible that such a guy would have friends, let alone a following.  I mean, it is for purposes of friend-making that we stop talking about how great our dads are in the first place.  In kindergarten, it might be cool to brag about your dad’s new Ford Taurus to the kid sitting next to you in the cafeteria, but by the time you get to 1st grade, comments of that nature are likely to be met with replies of, “Dude, get over it.  No one gives a crap about your dad.  We’re talking about Pokemon here.”  Similarly, it’s reasonable to say, “Ooh, mom’s out of town and dad is getting me pizza for dinner all week!” when you’re 11.  But when a 16 year old lad says that to his friends, his friends are going to reply, “Did he also get you a hooker?  If not, we are not interested.”

I know that the world wasn’t as replete with cool stuff during Jesus’ era as it is now, but I sincerely hope people had better things to talk about than dads.  (And that they had some schema for making people who talk excessively about lame stuff like dads and/or science and/or Magic cards feel socially exiled.)

5.) Some dudes saw fit to murder this guy, but he had no trouble coming back to life.

Right.  Because people come back to life all the time.  (Well, to be fair, in this day and age, people do “come back to life” with some frequency.  They “die” and then doctors shock their heart back into action or attach them to some machine until their body feels like living again.  But, as far as I know, there wasn’t a defibrillator inside the cave with Jesus.)  Anyway, this whole resurrection business is absurd.

6.) In celebration of the fact that his son rose from the dead, God commissioned a bunny to deliver baskets of chocolate, jelly beans, and racquetball videos* to children the world over. 

(*It is possible that the God only commissioned said bunny to bring racquetball videos to me.)

This strikes me as the obvious course of action . . . Son’s been granted eternal life?  Call up the bunnies!

Though, to His credit, God didn’t stick with this plan.  He realized that it was unreasonable to expect that a bunny could do his bidding.  So he gave up on the bunny plan and instead convinced parents the world over that they should give out baskets of goodies and then lie to their children and tell them that the baskets came from an animal.  Yes yes – this makes sense.  Certainly couldn’t have parents telling their children, “I love you just as God loved His son.  And just as God granted His son eternal life, I am granting you the right to consume more calories than I normally would.”  Much better to have parents deceive their children AND make them think it’s okay to eat food that’s been handled by a dirty, fur-covered creature.

7.) In celebration of the fact that God got a huge proportion of the world to believe in ridiculous premises 1-6, God decided his son should have a huge-ass birthday party every year.  He hired a burly fellow residing on a field of ice to throw this party.

I can totally understand God’s desire to celebrate His son’s existence.  I mean, my dad doesn’t throw big birthday parties for me anymore, but, as I made clear in my discussion of ridiculous premise 3, I haven’t always been as nice to my dad as Jesus was to His dad.  And Santa seems like a decent enough choice of party planner.  He’s jolly.  Kids love him.  He just happens to live with a fleet of midgets who are eager to do his bidding.  And, given the fact that he lives in the middle of fucking nowhere, he probably doesn’t have a lot else to do besides make toys.  So really, premise 7 isn’t really that ridiculous after all.  Except for a few small details . . .

a.) the Christmas tree
I know of a great way to praise Jesus!  Let’s take something living, kill it, bring it inside, and then cover it with shit.  (God had originally hoped that each family would kill its neighbor’s cat, bring the carcass inside, cover it with decorations, and then place presents beneath it, but people found that dead cats don’t smell quite as festive as dead trees.)

b.) Christmas stockings
Hmm . . . what is the ideal receptacle for all my gifts?  Of course – my sock!  I guess I could use something cleaner and less repugnant, such as, well, anything that hasn’t been on my feet, but where’s the fun in that?  Fungus-encased presents are the best sort of presents!

c.) Santa coming through people’s chimneys.
If Santa is magical enough to fly, why on earth would he opt to enter homes via chimneys?  Chimneys are absolutely disgusting.  I’m fairly sure every chimney on earth is full of 1.) grime, and 2.) dead squirrels.  Actually, I’m not certain that every chimney on earth is full of dead squirrels.  I think I heard once that squirrels don’t live everywhere.  So, in other countries, they probably have chimneys full of dead birds or dead kangaroos or something.  Regardless, I can’t imagine that Santa would want to enter my chimney.  (Plus, tossing a bag of presents down a long, dirty shaft sounds like a great way to damage my X-Box before I even open it.)

d.) Santa making it to every house on earth in a single night.
Really?  God will make this happen, but he won’t end wars?  Or provide hungry people with food?  Or help doctors find a cure for AIDS?  Oh wait, God loves AIDS.  Because it kills the gays.  I forgot.  No wonder, when it comes to granting people the ability to reach seemingly unreachable goals, God prioritizes a fat man in a red suit (and Tony Dungy) over doctors working on curing incurable diseases.

The list of really weird shit that accompanies the Christmas season could easily go on and on, but I'll cut myself off here for purposes of staying concise.  (And we all know the extent to which I pride myself on my succinct prose . . . To be fair though, I was really concise last week.)  I think the point has been made that this whole Jesus business is pretty ridiculous and unbelievable.

So where do I go from here, now that I know that the reasons for celebrating Christmas and Easter are totally loco? 

1.) I could discontinue celebrating these holidays.  Yeah right!  Holidays are awesome!

2.) I could accept all these ridiculous premises as true.  As priests often say/chant, "Let us proclaim the mysssstery of faiiiiith!"  (Well, I'm not super-qualified to assert that priests often say this.  I do know that it's regularly said at Christmas Eve mass and/or Easter morning mass and/or Grandma's-come-to-visit mass, a.k.a. Tori's "Big Three".)  Faith is mysterious.  It involves believing stuff that's unbelievable.  Presumably, if a highly religious individual were to read my post, he/she would respond, "Yes, the story of Jesus' life is unbelievable.  But it did happen.  Which is proof that Jesus is a miraculous being.  And that we should all do what he would do.  And wear tacky WWJD jewelry to remind us of such."  Basically, being religious involves holding sacred totally crazy shit.  My life, by contrast, involves incessantly mocking totally crazy shit.  Religion just isn't going to work out.

3.) I could search deep within my soul and find a feminist justification for the celebration of these holidays.  Okay, so as I mentioned way back when in the discussion of premise 1, I think Mary was raped by Joseph.  Rape is obviously an atrocity.  It takes so much away from women - it takes away their dignity and their power and their feelings of control.  Because rape takes so much away from women, it seems only reasonable that there should be a holiday that involves giving something to women - a holiday devoted to showering women with gifts.  Let's get rid of Christmas as is (a celebration of a "miraculous" birth) and replace it with Rape Sucks Day.  RSD could still fall on December 25th (in remembrance of the birth of the most famous product of rape of all time) and could have much in common with Christmas.  Everybody could still get presents - not just women, as men get raped too.  We'd probably want to replace the fallic Christmas tree with a more woman-friendly Chrismas bush however.

As far as Easter is concerned, I'm not so comfortable celebrating the fact that someone came back from the dead.  I'm sure there are lots of dudes out there who like celebrating alien resurrections and zombies and weird-ass shit like that.  (They're probably all buddies with Justin Douglas.)  But that's just not my scene.  However, if we're willing to loosen our definitions, I guess we could say that Easter's all about coming on to tough times, picking yourself back up, and pressing onward.  And I like that theme.  The feminists are all about that theme.  Men have tried to hold us back, but we have prevailed.  So let's eat baskets full of joy in celebration of the progress we've made.  And since being a woman is all about the power of fertility, we could keep the whole egg schema and everything.

Well then, I guess I'm all set to keep on holidaying!  Happy Rape Sucks Day and Feminist Progress Day everybody!

Men in Cages" runs Friday afternoons.  You can read more about Tori here.

Comments

[EmGusk]

yay Judaism!

[Jerome]

That wrapped xmas cat was pretty funny.

[Lauren]

This may be the longest post in the history of the Internet.

[Tori]

Responding in reverse alphabetical order . . .

Lauren - I have definitely posted longer.
Jerome - I initially made the mistake of searching for images of "dead cats." This turns up some pretty gross shit. I opted in favor of making a sleeping cat look dead so that people could laugh instead of hurl.
Emily - This post was not intended to praise Jews (only to specify that Jews are less likely to think their offspring to be the second coming of Christ). For the record, your holidays are also ridiculous.

[EmGusk]

definitely, but we don't claim that there's a war on our holidays. i think you should e-mail this to bill o'reilly. he'd definitely want to be your bff then.

p.s. in our camp can we talk about how religion is silly but fun?

[Tori]

P.P.S.: Emily, did you see "Jesus Camp"?

[KELLYq]

Tori
This post had a great length-to-funny ratio
also i liked the christmas cat
and
can we dress kingsley up like that but not kill him?

[Tori]

for my beloved KELLYq:

Decorated Kingsley - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v515/BigRedDM05/decoratedkingsley.jpg

Decorating Kingsley -
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v515/BigRedDM05/decoratingkingsley.jpg

[EmGusk]

noo but i really really want to

[justin]

haha that tubby bastard is so festive

[Alex]

Dear Tori,

You should read the story "Santa Claus vs. The Easter Bunny" by David Sedaris. It is hilarious. He reads it aloud at the end of the following radio show on NPR, but I don't know if you can fast forward to the last eleven minutes or not.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=799