The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas

Contents

Title Page

WELCOME

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas

STORIES

It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas

The Real Christmas Story

A Child Was Born on Christmas Day

110 Love Street

Losing My Faith

Hark the Herald Villagers Sing

A Christmas Miracle

SCIENCE

The Sound of Christmas

The Great Bus Mystery

Starry, Starry Night

The Ironed Trouser: Why 93% of Scientists Are Atheists (Depending on Who You Ask)

The Large Hadron Collider: A Scientific Creation Story

The Power of Ideas

How to Understand Christmas: A Scientific Overview

HOW TO

Things to Make and Do at Christmas

How to Have the Perfect Jewish Christmas

How to Have a Peaceful Pagan Christmas

I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas

How To Stop Worrying and Enjoy Christmas

How to Decorate the Outside of Your House with Lights and Not Have Your Neighbours Hate You: A guide to turning your home into a festive something that is so bright it can be seen from space

How to Escape from Christmas

PHILOSOPHY

On Kindness

If God Existed, Would He Have a Sense of Humour?

Unsilent Night

The True Meaning of Christmas

Imagine There’s a Heaven

The First Honest Christmas Round-Robin Letter

A Happy Christmas

ARTS

An Atheist at the Movies

A Christmas Carol

O Little Town

Simon Price’s Christmas Album

Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree

It’s a Wonderful Life

The Good Books

EVENTS

God Isn’t Real

God Trumps

Designing the Atheist Bus Campaign

The Godless Concerts

The Little Atoms Radio Show

A Day in the Life of a Godless Magazine

James Randi: The Real Santa Claus

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Extract

SECULAR RESOURCES

THANK YOU TO...

Copyright

About the Publisher

WELCOME

Welcome to The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, the atheist book it’s safe to leave around your granny. Here, you’ll find no chapters titled ‘666 Ways to Diss the Pope’, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Church Graffiti’, or ‘How to Bash the Bishop’. There’s only one joke about Islamic fundamentalists, coming up now:

Q: Why was Abu Hamza a rubbish receptionist?

A: Because the phone was always off the hook*

and an undecided number of jokes about agnostics† (we wanted to write some, but we weren’t sure, and then we thought we might, but we weren’t certain).

*Abu Hamza was indeed a receptionist in a West London hotel in 1983. This was before he had a hook, but let’s not pull apart a joke that wasn’t fit for a Christmas cracker to start with.

† For the purposes of this Christmas book, they should henceforth be known as ‘eggnogstics’.

THE ATHEIST’S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS

What you will find are forty-two* brilliant contributions from the world’s most entertaining atheist scientists, comedians, philosophers and writers, who have all donated their time, thought and jokes for free to help you enjoy Christmas.

Maybe you bought this book for yourself, or perhaps there’s a price sticker over the ‘A’ of ‘Atheist’ and your devout great-aunt bought it for you, hoping to make you more religious. Either way, all royalties are going straight to the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity, Terrence Higgins Trust, so to whoever bought it: thank you. (What do you mean, you haven’t bought it yet and you’re still loitering in the bookshop reading this with your grubby thumbs on the pages? Take it to the counter this instant!)

Whenever I read book introductions, I start bellowing internally, ‘Shut up and let me get on with the book!’ So I hope you enjoy every page, and that you have a truly excellent Christmas.

ARIANE SHERINE

*Because forty-two, as explained in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. If you haven’t yet read it, you might want to buy it along with this book. Although the sales assistant may then think you only buy books with the title format The _____ Guide to ______.

STORIES

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

MARK TWAIN

It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas

ED BYRNE

‘I’ve already done all my Christmas shopping for this year. I bought all my aunties socks and Y-fronts. See how they like it.’

For many years, that was my only Christmas joke. Seeing as Christmas can be quite a lucrative time for a jobbing comic, a time when you can get paid two or even three times your normal fee in compensation for having to entertain people who are two or even three times more drunk and rowdy than normal, you would think I would have written a slew of seasonal zingers to keep the paper-hatted hordes chuckling into their lukewarm mulled wine. But I never did. I would kick off with my little morsel of Christmas humbuggery and then carry straight on with my usual cavalcade of jokes about smoking, drinking and slagging off Alanis Morissette. Why, I imagine you’re wondering, was this so? Why would somebody who, particularly in his early circuit days, was so eager to churn out crowd-pleasing material not hit that stage with an arsenal of Yuletide yuk-yuks? Surely someone with such a pragmatic approach to comedy would have at least a solid five minutes of holiday-based lateral thinking thrown into a box of sarcasm, wrapped in whimsy paper all tied up in the pink bow of impeccable timing? But no.

The reason for this is simple: I have always found it easier to write jokes about things I hate, and I don’t hate Christmas. Sure, there’s been some dodgy stuff left for me under the tree over the years. ‘Oh, did Santa run out of Scalextric sets? Well, I suppose Tamyanto make one just as good.’ The Santa Claus that came to our house did not believe in paying for advertising. As I grew older and Santa was replaced by my parents, they continued in this vein. Maybe they were early anti-globalisation activists and thought they should boycott major bicycle manufacturers like Raleigh or Dawes. Maybe that’s why at the age of fourteen I was the proud owner of the only Orbita 10-speed in all of North County Dublin.

It wasn’t that my folks were being cheap. They were just doing their bit to fight the power of Big Bike. I’m not saying that Orbita don’t make a quality product, but I can’t help but think that they could have built up much better word-of-mouth if they hadn’t sold my dad a bike with two right pedals. Yes. Two right pedals. When it comes to bicycle pedals, two rights make a wrong. He did try to return the bike a couple of days later, but found out the hard way that a gift shop that wasn’t there before December 1st won’t be there after December 24th. Well, I say he found out the hard way. He wasn’t the one pedalling to school with only one foot. By the time I was fourteen, I was so asymmetrically developed it took all my concentration not to walk in a circle.

Crappy presents notwithstanding, I’ve always been a big Christmas mush, enjoying the sentimentality of the season. New Year, I’ve always felt, can go and shite. Maybe that’s because as a kid I always used to babysit the neighbours’ kids so that the neighbours could go to a party at my parents’ house. But Christmas has always been my favourite time of the year. Even going to mass—a pastime I obviously have little love for if I’m included in this book—was more fun on Christmas Day because we all got to look at each other in our Christmas clothes. Those of us who got decent trendy-looking ones getting to point and laugh uproariously at the chunky-knit efforts of those less fortunate. This was one aspect of Christmas where my mother never let me down. We couldn’t afford Armani, but at least I never had to endure the humiliation of a reindeer on my jumper at age thirteen.

So Christmas has always been in my cool book. I’ve always found it easier to make fun of holidays like Halloween, which must be a very difficult time for paedophiles that are really trying to shake the habit. Imagine! You’ve got the urges. You know it’s wrong, so you lock yourself in the house out of harm’s way. October 31st rolls around and kids are knocking the door down. All of them dressed in cute little outfits, asking for sweets. You don’t even have to offer. Sweets are being requested. That’s almost entrapment, if you ask me.

However, much like everything else since I hit my thirties, certain things are beginning to annoy me about my favourite holiday. Sure, there are the usual headaches that just come as you get older. Not enough time to go shopping. Swearing that next year you won’t leave it too late to do it online. Trying to come to a compromise with your wife regarding whose family you should spend it with. Yours, hers, or perhaps some neutral family that you both loathe equally. Everything gets more complicated as you get older, and the responsibilities of adulthood are always going to do their best to choke the living joy out of any occasion. I’m not really talking about that. I’m talking about something that I used to find exciting about Christmas as a youngster but as an older man I just find wearisome, and that is the length of the lead-up to it.

As you get older there are three things you observe: policemen are getting younger. Teenage girls are dressing more like prostitutes. And Christmas comes earlier every year.

Christmas is a special time for a lot of us, and the rituals, sights, smells and sounds that go along with it can be very effective at stirring up childhood memories of Christmases past and generating a nostalgic, sentimental glow. But if shops start hanging tinsel in October it doesn’t take long for the spell to be broken. Seriously: when you hear Wizzard’s ‘I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday’, does it remind you of sipping mulled wine next to a roaring fire or does it remind you of November in Woolworths?

I was in my local Tesco a couple of years ago and they were selling Christmas food IN SEPTEMBER. That’s too early. Mid-September and they had shelves of stollen, Christmas pud and mince pies. Nobody is that organised that they buy food three and a half months in advance. Anyone who is that organised makes their own food. Just out of curiosity I pulled a pack of mince pies off the shelf to check the ‘best before’ date and I swear to you it was November 10th. What sort of numpty buys mince pies that go off in November? And don’t tell me that some people might just want to eat mince pies in September. You only eat mince pies at Christmas, and most of us don’t even like them then. I guess the logic is, they’re generally so foul you can’t tell if they’ve gone off or not. Personally, I think you may as well wipe your arse on some digestive biscuits and hand them round as shove a mince pie under my nose, regardless where we are relative to its ‘best before’ date.

What nearly made my wife and I weep genuine tears of actual sadness was the fact that they were also selling single slices of Christmas cake. Imagine that. Not two slices, maybe for a couple who couldn’t be bothered to make a whole cake. No. One slice. That’s a slice for you and no slice for your no pals. It’s important, now and again, to spare a thought for those less fortunate than us who might be spending Christmas alone, but I don’t need such a stark reminder as single slices of Christmas cake on sale in September. That means that, with over three months to go, the bloke in question is already resigned to the fact that he’ll be on his tod this festive season. He’s already got it all planned out. ‘I’ll have a Bernard Matthews Turkey Drummer, followed by a single slice of Christmas cake. Then I’ll open the card I sent to myself. After which I’ll stand on one end of a cracker and pull the other, get drunk, have a wank under the mistletoe and pass out. Happy holidays!’

As depressing a notion as that is, is it any more depressing than the thought of somebody buying mince pies that go off in November? Because, for me, that conjures up images of people who, for some reason, have had to have Christmas early this year. Nobody has an early Christmas for a happy reason. It’s more likely to be a sad reason like, ‘Grandad’s not going to make it to December. We’re having Christmas in November this year and we’re going to enjoy it! We’ll tell him it’s December. He’s so far gone he won’t know the difference.’ Either that or, ‘We have Christmas in October so that Uncle Brendan can spend it with us. He generally goes back to prison shortly after that. It’s not really his fault. He does try to stay out of trouble, but he tends to fall off the wagon at Halloween.’

(Do you see what I did there? That was called reincorporation. It’s a classic comedy trick. You probably thought it was strange that I should even have mentioned Halloween in an essay about Christmas, initially. You probably thought I was just padding out my piece with a bit of Halloween filler. But I wasn’t. All the while I was building to that Uncle Brendan callback. Pretty clever, huh?)

So, what am I trying to say here? I guess the point I’m making is that shitty Scalextric knock-offs and bikes with two right pedals didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for Christmas, but greedy retailers who try to get me into a premature Christmas mood do. I propose a moratorium on all kinds of Christmas marketing pre mid-November. The Advertising Standards Authority should introduce a rule saying sleigh bells may not feature in adverts until the first week of December. And while we’re at it, let’s introduce a law banning the sale or display of tinsel in shops until December 15th. Failing that, I think Wizzard should get back in the studio and record a song called ‘It Should Only Feel Like Christmas One Month a Year’.

The Real Christmas Story

JENNY COLGAN

I’ve always been enthralled by Christmas. The English ideal, at any rate (where I come from in Scotland, Hogmanay was always the crowd-puller). The crackling snow, the animals lying down in their stalls silently at midnight in homage to the infant king; and, particularly, the glorious carolling heritage (my favourite is the rarely sung Nurse’s Carol, joining the choir being the sole highpoint of a miserable year long ago working in a hospital):

As the evening draws on

And dark shadows alight

With slow-breathing ox-en

To warm him all ni-i-ght

The prince of compassion

Concealed in a byre

Watches the rafters above him

RESPLENDENT WITH FIRE.

Good King Wenceslas, with his foreign fountains and strange ways, was as mystical to me as anything in Narnia; likewise the three kings, whose sonorous names and inexplicable gifts—

Myrrh have I

Its bitter perfume

Breathes a life

Of gathering gloom

Sorrowing, sighing

Bleeding, dying

Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

—gave me strange, excited thrills.

In my teens, I dressed up as a Victorian wench and took part in carol-singing tableaux at the local castle; the same one where, years later, I would get married—at Christmas time, the pillars swathed in holly and ivy. (Incidentally, if you’re having a secular service and aren’t allowed to mention the word God, I can save you some time and effort and inform you that the only carol that legally passes muster for a non-religious Christmas wedding is ‘Deck the Halls’.)

One of the great joys of having your own children, of course, is sharing Christmas with them. My husband, a Kiwi, spent all his childhood Christmases barbecuing on the beach and is entirely unfussed by the whole affair, but I had such wonderful Christmases that I want to make it as special as I can. Still, how to do that without fundamentally accusing their teachers of lying—or, in fact, lying?

And it is, after all, one of the greatest stories ever told—the little baby born in a manger, far from home. It has intrigue, small children (drummer boys are particularly popular in my house), stars, angels, various animals and getting to sleep outdoors—all catnip to littlies.

But, as that wonderfully conflicted cove John Betjeman put it:

…is it true? For if it is…

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare—

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Because, of course, accepting the Christmas story means accepting a whole bunch of other stuff; doctrine perhaps not quite so tea-towel—and stuffed-lamb-friendly. And now my three-year-old is at pre-school—a Catholic pre-school, no less, it being our local—of course, the questions have begun.

‘Are you having the Baby Jesus?’ he says, prodding my large pregnant stomach.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s been done.’

‘Oh. Are you having a monkey?’

‘I hope not.’

I find him in the bedroom with the lovely nativity book his devout—and devoted—granny has sent him, even though he hasn’t been baptised and thus is slightly damned and stuff, arguing with his friend Freya.

‘Those are the three kings,’ he says solemnly.

‘NO! They’re the three wise men!’ said Freya, in a tone that brooks no argument.

‘NO! They are KINGS!’

‘WISE MEN!’

‘KINGS!’

‘MUM!!! FREYA SAYS SHE KNOWS MY STORY BUT IT IS MY STORY!!!’

‘IT IS MY STORY!’

‘It is,’ I say, ‘everyone’s story. It is one of the most famous stories ever told. Nearly everyone you will ever meet will know a little bit about this story.’

Wallace thinks about this for a bit.

‘No. It is just mine. Grandma sent it to me.’

Sometimes I feel like Charlotte in Sex and the City, having one last Christmas tree before she gives it all up for Judaism.

I take the boys to Christmas-morning mass—where my mother is playing the organ—but they don’t know when to sit or stand, or what to do, and I am unaccountably nostalgic for a life I never wanted.

Christmas, as a practising Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church. We were constantly told that Easter was the more important festival, but Easter is relatively speaking, RUBBISH. Yes, there’s a chocolate egg, but six weeks of no sweets plus Stations of the Cross on Wednesdays, Good Friday mass, confession and the Saturday vigil (HOURS long)—the trade-off is, frankly, just not worth it. Though the palms on Palm Sunday are quite good.

Christmas, on the other hand, is just normal amounts of church (except, alas, that totally gruesome year it fell on a Saturday and we couldn’t believe we had to go again the next day), but also school parties, the Blue Peter advent ring, the calendar, going to Woolies to buy your mum a tiny bottle of Heather Spirit cologne (69p), and the glorious bellowing of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’—a song more than a thousand years old—all serving merely to heighten the crazed, overwhelming anticipation that could only be sated by a pack of thirty felt-tip pens, graded by shade, yellow in the middle, and getting to eat lots of very small sausages.

But there is another story too, I know, to tell my little ones; perhaps not quite as immediate, but wonderful in its own way, and it starts:

‘In the northern parts of the world, the winters are long, and cold and dark, and people would get sad and miserable. So they have always in the very depths of winter, from the beginning of recorded time, celebrated light, and life, and the promise of renewal and new birth, just when they most needed cheering up.

‘And they would store food, and eat, and drink and be merry. And, in time, different cultures and creeds passed over the world, and changed and added to the stories about why we were celebrating, and said that perhaps we were celebrating because of a green man, or Mithras, or Sol, or that the Baby Jesus was being born, or because Santa Claus is flying over the world—look here, NASA even tracks him by satellite (www.noradsanta.org).

‘And now, like all the millions of people who lived before us, we too use midwinter to see our family and exchange gifts, and feast and be merry and carry on traditions from our ancestors.’

And they will say, ‘Why?’

And I will say, ‘Because we love you.’

And I will wonder, as I often do, why we love our children—our own children, not a chimera wrapped in swaddling clothes and found in a manger—so very, very much, and wishing, as atheists, that there were slightly more reassuring, less genetic, cold scientific reasons that we could give for why this is so.

And then I will probably just say, ‘Shall we sing “Little Donkey” again?’, knowing that they will immediately rush off to fetch their sweet Christmas bells.

A Child Was Born on Christmas Day

EMERY EMERY

Being born on December 25th, I often found myself quite melancholy around the holidays. As a child it was simply not possible for my family to give me the special attention that most enjoy on the hallowed day of their birth. For children unfortunate enough to share their birthday with Jesus, Christmas is an unholy day of disappointment and loneliness.

Every birthday party I attended was clearly a day set aside specifically to celebrate one person’s most important life event—emerging from deep within their mother’s womb and surviving the ordeal. I had survived, but as it turns out, the Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin on December 25th and they deem it a miracle. How can any kid compete with that?

My grandmother raised me for my first ten years, and she tried her best to make me feel special every Christmas. She would bake a cake just for me. One year it was in the shape of a snowman and another it was Santa’s face. I especially enjoyed the Santa cake because I was allowed to take a knife to good Ol’ Saint Nick. There was a cathartic quality to it. I don’t remember any Jesus cakes, but that would have been nice as well.

Even though Grandma tried to make Christmas just a bit more about me, her efforts always fell short as throngs of family poured into the house to exchange gifts with each other and give me my two-birds-with-one-stone presents. ‘Happy Birthday & Merry Christmas’ was often written on the gift tags. I recall plotting to give people birthday gifts that said ‘Happy Birthday & Merry Christmas’, and I would then make a conscious decision to not give them anything on Christmas Day. But somehow, I just couldn’t go through with it.

During one of my early teenage years, in a conciliatory effort, my mother decided my birthday would be celebrated on the half-year, June 25th. I thought this was a really great idea, and I was insanely excited. I ran to my room and marked it on my calendar. Sadly, Mom was not very good with follow-through and, while she may well have marked a calendar herself, she had forgotten to check it. June came and went without any fanfare. Needless to say, my disappointment grew even more profound.