Tel America: Excavating Christmas
Submitted by Dr. Eugene Mayhew, December, 2008
In the year A. D. 3,674, archaeologists from the nation of Equator were finishing up their 300th season of excavating in the ancient nation of America, known to archaeologists simply as Tel America. As they packed up their picks, shovels, wheel barrows, sifters, trowels, rubber buckets and a wide variety of sophisticated equipment like ground penetrating radar machines and satellite imaging computers, their published reports on the findings started to be made available to the press.
After years of excavating in all the major cities of America, fascinating conclusions have been drawn on the religious ideas of the primitive Americans. According to published reports, probably the most interesting religious festive time of the year in old America was in their month of December, that was confusingly referred to as Happy Holidays, Xmas, Ho Ho Ho, Chanakah, Sale, Bargain, Kwanza, Shop till You Drop, Christmas, Yuletide, and a host of other cryptic names.
This holiday seems to have been a collage of several old Americana deities that all got meshed together by the business people to heavily capitalize off the event. These old deities appeared to be endowed with supernatural attributes, such as, Ebenezer Scrooge, a rehabilitated miser turned nice guy clairvoyant; Frosty the Snowman, a snow flake pied piper who had the power to transfer life powers to piles of snow; the Maccabee brothers, who supernaturally burned the oil in a candelabra days beyond the oil was gone; Rudolph the Red Nose Caribou, who had the supernatural ability to transcend the surly bonds of earth and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings to fly in the stratosphere as his master delivered gifts via chimney invasions all over the world; then there was the ever present Santa Claus, an unusually dressed European Eskimo, who was omnipresent on whether a kid was naughty or nice to determine if the child got an actual gift or was dissed by the old guy; then there was god Grinch who would attack the financial part of the festivities to try to throw a wrench into the collage amidst the warnings of the business community who would say it wasn’t a good festival if you listened to Grinch – in other words don’t celebrate a Grinchless Christmas; and then there was Jesus of Nazareth, a middle eastern carpenter, who for some unknown reason the festival was originally named for in earlier times.
But, the most astounding find in Tel America were two massive temple complexes, one on the west coast and another on the east coast of old America. It appears, that the ancient Americans worshipped a huge rodent. In fact, idols of this rodent have been found in the ruins of millions of homes all over America.
Strange people these ancient Americans, it appears that they could not articulate where the December celebration came from and what it was really about, as seen in many of their confusing documents and books
A large part of our responsibility this time of the year is to clarify, separating fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, make believe from the marvelous, remembering that Wise Men and Women still seek Him.