We here at Cornography are looking forward to another delightful holiday season sitting with our families in front of the flaming yule log, serving warm glasses of wassail to the carolers on the street and spending hours on end at the Wal-Mart service desk waiting to pick up the gifts we reserved for our loved ones months ago. In the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season, many forget the true meaning of the holiday. With that in mind, our editorial staff completed tedious research to create a short yet precise account of how this glorious holiday came to be. Share it with those you love and take time to remember. This truly is the most wonderful time of the year.
From our families to yours,
Jim Collar and Eric Schramm
As tradition tells, the holiday we know as Christmas began in the small Israeli town of Bethlehem during the reign of King Herod Antipas nearly 2,000 years ago. It was the year of the Roman census and a poor couple - Mary and Joseph - made a long journey from their home at the North Pole that might be counted in accordance with the law.* Mary, who was pledged to marry Joseph, was quite noticeably with child. Her pregnancy hurt the carpenter deeply as realized his prescription medication for correction of erectile dysfunction ran out more than nine months prior to their journey.
It was then that an angel appeared..**
"Go forward and marry the woman," the angel told Joseph. "The child is a child of God."
He continued his words with the couple.
"You are to name the baby Santa Claus. He is the one they prophesied about - the one who will sit in department stores from Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve taking wish lists from greedy children. He is the one who in one night will deliver toys, electronics and other items to households around the world, thus increasing both personal indebtedness and the annual profit margin of thousands of global corporate retailers."
The couple heeded the words of the angel and continued forward.
When reaching Bethlehem, it was late in the evening and Mary knew it was time to deliver her child onto the world. The couple stopped at a nearby two-bit motel, however the neon light in the window flashed "no vacancy."
They played stowaway in a stable at the rear of the building where they quickly put into practice months of breathing exercise lessons and other natural birth pain reduction methods.
Meanwhile, three wise men in the east looked ahead to a bright shining star.***
They spoke briefly about their weekend plans and decided to follow it for no other reason than the fact that the baby Santa Claus - a child they did not know - might be lying in a manger beneath.
The wise men arrived in Bethlehem on the backs of reindeer a few days later and greeted the baby Santa Claus with fabulous gifts. They brought the child three videos - The Best of Solid Gold, the Little Mermaid and Frankenstein - handsomely packaged in a collectible, library-style box.
Shepherds in the area joined the wise men in rejoicing the birth of the child and a choir of angels appeared from the heavens. Among them were Hark the Herald Angel and his wife Christmas Carol who sang a medley of songs to the baby including Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bell Rock.
Based on an earlier meeting, the wise men were supposed to report to Herod to reveal the location of the child. He wanted to kill the child as he found it odd that a white, jolly fat baby was located in a town dominated by people of Jewish and Arabic descent.
News soon spread that Herod ordered the killing of all white jolly fat babies under the age of three. Mary, Joseph and the child Santa Claus then fled back to the North Pole.
The gospels of Santa Claus reveal little else about his childhood, resuming at the time he reached thirty years of age and gathered his 12 elves for service to the people of Earth.
It's this we must remember as we gather for Christmas.
By the miracle of the manger in Bethlehem and the life he continues to live, we will all be able to play with a host of killer toys by 8 a.m. on Christmas morning.
Footnotes:
*According to census officials, legislation passed in 1943 ended the mandatory trips to Bethlehem and replaced them with the current long and short paper forms of enumeration used today. It must also be noted that in the census indicated above, the North Pole lost several representatives to Congress and electoral votes because Mary and Joseph were the only two in the region with enough civic mindedness to make the long and treacherous journey.
**The most accurate Hebrew manuscripts indicate that the angel was in fact baseball hall-of-famer and former California Angel Rod Carew.
***Many manuscripts cite these wise men as the famed three kings of Orient are. Modern day scholars, however, said because the wise men were notably of Arabic descent, there is much more likelihood that they were either university math or economics professors.