#202 Blitzen

The Twelve days of Christmas end quicker than the leap of a lord slipping on a room full of bird poop. The eight days of Hanukah zoom by like a dreidel on an air hockey table and the 30 days of Ramadan, why, they fly by faster than a month of Decembers. Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is, the holidays are too short. One minute you’re last-minute Christmas shopping at the convenience store at 3 in the morning on Christmas eve and the next minute you’re sitting in a pile of pathetically once-pretty paper. And assuming for a moment the archeological-sociological theory that the reason the holidays of so many faiths are grouped this time of year is to while away the winter hours, why heck, we got a whole bunch of winter still ahead of us to be wily with.
Let’s stop for a moment and examine that notion. Hanukah, Christmas, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, and the Pagan celebration of the Solstice are all in or around December. All during the shortest daylight hours of the year. All during a season where you got no planting and no harvesting to do. Where you got nothing but dried fish, jerky smoked meats, and an occasionally unlucky or slow fowl to eat. No veggies or fresh fruits. What better time to get together with the relatives and exchange gifts, and most likely, genes. September babies, of which, I hesitate to contemplate, I am one, owe their prodigious quantities to Christmas cheer, Hanukah hankypanky, or Kwanzaal kwazyness. Cause, let’s face it, eggnog and birth control don’t mix. There’s a reason why even one of Santa’s reindeer is a symbol of drunkenness. But Blitzen aside, we all know that when Santa gets done trimming the tree or when the bottle pops at New Years there’s some mistletoe to reckon with.
And it’s not just a new set of genes, or at least a re-jumbling thereof, that people could expect come holiday, some archeo-epidemiologists have suggested that this social time was also the time that humans evolved resistance to various bacteriological and viral bugs. By mixing and matching viruses and sneezes and coughing in confined spaces, humans were able to swap infections and cook up antibodies like muffins in an easy-bake oven. So look at it this way next time you suffer through an annoying Christmas party. These festive gatherings with friends of friends and in-laws and relatives of suspicious lineage that look more like their neighborhood’s mailman every year are actually helping in the fight to defeat the avian flu. Sort of. Actually, the way evolution works is that the weak will die and the people that survive will be resistant to the flu but hey, maybe one of the dead guys will be the one who got you that tie so ugly it looks like he bought it in a convenience store.
America, ya gotta love it.