At a former job of mine there used to be this one older, kind of sour, guy who would sit out all of the office Christmas parties because: 'The Bible says there were shepherds out in the field watching their sheep when Jesus was born, which means that he couldn't have been born in December, so it's wrong to celebrate his birthday now'. Well, duh. Okay. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a few cookies and chug some egg nog anyways and just pretend that Jesus was born December twenty fifth, just like the rest of us are doing.

This guy, by the way, was a member of one of the more extreme Christian evangelical faiths - I forget which one - and it was discovered that he was misbehaving scandalously. As you probably could have predicted. For some reason you never hear about this sort of stuff with secular humanists. Just why do you think that is?

Really, there is about a one in three hundred and sixty five chance that Jesus was actually born on Christmas, so it's not entirely wrong to celebrate on this day. It's just not very likely that you're right. The Roman Emperor Constantine wisely decreed that since every good Roman was celebrating Saturnalia at this time - where people exchanged gifts and whooped it up a lot - this would be a good time to also celebrate the birth of Christ. Constantine wasn't himself a Christian but a worshiper of Sol Invictus (the all conquering Sun) so, in the Good old Roman tradition of borrowing convenient Gods from foreign lands, he decided that Jehovah was just another name for Sol Invictus and there you go. Problem solved.

You have to wonder how pleased the Son of God is to have his birthday commemorated ... whenever. It's not really an honor when your worshipers purposefully and knowingly have it all wrong and don't seem to care much. It's nice, I guess that people remember your birthday but it probably would be nicer if they remembered your actual birthday, rather than just some day they were partying, anyways. Did you ever think that maybe one of the reasons he hasn't come back to the Earth is that he wants us to get it right? Maybe when we do, maybe then he'll return from Heaven.

Steve Sommers is the author of Breakfast with the Antichrist. His new novel, REXROI, along with the best of Australian Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy is available in ebook format at http://www.rspublishing.com.au, OR - if you ABSOLUTELY insist on turning pages when you read - at http:www.lulu.com/content/306670