I’ve made my opinions about Christmas as compared to other holidays clear in other posts to this blog. I’ve also talked about adding other gift-giving holidays to take the pressure off Christmas. Nothing I have done approaches the idea of giving Christmas its original meaning as developed in medieval Christendom. That would be like Horace telling the Romans to abandon their city and find a distant land to settle in to cure their corruption issues.

Today, I’ll cross that line and talk about a real old-fashioned Christmas: drunkenness, feasting, and role reversals. During the Middle Ages, Christmas was a two-week-long binge of beer and bacon. The twelve days of Christmas lasted twelve damn days. Everyone had to get the time off. Serfs, apprentices, students, lower officials in the church. Not only were lords required to give their serfs time off, but they were also expected to throw a party for the peasants on their own dime, complete with booze, roast boar, and even entertainment. Cross-dressing, practical jokes on the nobility, and getting completely plastered were all par for the course.

This all culminated in the Feast of Fools on January 1 celebrated by the clergy, known in Paris as Topsy Turvy Day for the complete inversion of any hierarchies within the church. Choir boys were appointed as bishops. Priests would eat black pudding on the altar and wear obscene masks during mass. Subdeacons would give their superiors orders. All of this derived from ancient pagan festivals where slaves would treat their masters as equals. Occasionally, you can still find signs of these role inversions, such as in the British Army where the officers serve dinner to the enlisted men.

See, that’s the real Christmas spirit. The King of Kings was born in a manger, not in a palace. The king who lived in a palace killed every male infant under two in Judea trying to get rid of him because Herod was afraid of any challenge to his power. Jesus escaped to Egypt, and if old Herod knew that people would use his birthday as an excuse to tell their superiors where to shove it and then say “feed me,” Herod may have killed all the girls just to be safe. The term “public servant” isn’t meant to be a sad joke and your employer has a moral responsibility to be a leader of men and not merely a consumer of services, whether he accepts that or not.

So, sorry, Charlie Brown, I don’t think we’re recapturing the Christmas Spirit anytime soon. I’ll believe we’ve recovered the true meaning of the Yule Tide season when Elon Musk shines my damned shoes.