Christmas.

Christmas has a lot of non-Christian origins, and even though I am a Christian and I celebrate the gift God gave the world through the miraculous birth of Jesus, I still think the old traditions have merit too.

Winter is an incredibly depressing season, especially in the north where there's less daylight. Most of your crops are harvested and since it would be difficult to keep cattle over the winter, most of your herds are drying in the smokehouse as well. Pretty much all the work is done and you're sick of solitaire, so you settle back and look for something to do. Since sex only results in more mouths to feed, that's out of the question. So you throw a party. But you can't have a party for no reason so you wait until the winter solstice, and celebrate the return of the sun.

You decorate your house with holly, which because of its thorns, traps mischievous fairies like its flypaper. You want to remember the summertime, so you cut evergreen branches and ivy and decorate the house. You take the biggest green log you can find and burn it for hours 'cause... fire is cool and mesmerizing, and green logs make sparks, which are fun when they aren't burning down your house. If you've been good, a little elf man rides an elk to your house to give you a present. If you are bad, a giant cat comes and eats you.

Apples, like potatoes, will last for a while if you put them in a root cellar. But around December, they'll be shrivelly, so you mush them into cider and heat it up and spike it with alcohol, 'cause who ever heard of a party without alcohol? The alcohol warms your soul, so you go out wassailing (ie, singing loudly, offering alcohol to your neighbors, and generally bringing the party out of your house and into the streets.)

Doesn't that sound like a cool party? Since the shepherds were out watching their flocks by night, we can assume it was lambing season, the only time you really need to stay up all night with the flocks. Lambing season is in the spring, so I'm thinking I'd like to celebrate Christ's birth in March, and this December, sing loudly with a cup of spiked apple cider in hand, waiting for Jultomten to come riding up on his elk and fight it out with Santa over who gets to give me the present I want.

Incidentally, the gift-giving tradition came about in the Victorian era when parenting was becoming less strict and parents wanted a way to lavish gifts on their children without giving the appearance of spoiling them. The morality of being generous to others at Christmas time traces directly back to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and although it is important for Christians to be generous in sharing the love of Christ, Charles Dickens is not a religious figure and I see no need to follow the example Scrooge sets at the end of the book. However, I WILL share my wassail.