A staple in yearly fundamentalist Christmas service is the Reading of the Corrections wherein the pastor will list for the congregation everything that is wrong with the depictions of and traditions surrounding the Christmas story. Nothing says goodwill toward men like a good old-fashioned debunking.

It goes something like this…

For starters the Magi weren’t kings and they were not at the manger and neither were there necessarily three of them (although there must have been more than two because “men” is plural) and nothing except tradition says any of them were black so just to be safe we bought two whole nativity scenes so we could end up with a total of four white dudes but regardless of how many there were the point is that it was years later that they showed up so that’s why the wise men from our nativity scene are currently standing out in the east parking lot instead of in front of the church with the rest of the manger crowd.

Also Jesus was probably not born in December although we really don’t know what time of year it was and who knows exactly why we celebrate Christmas in December although I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with pagans or Catholics because we would never participate in anything that that crowd might be up to like all those celebrations of fertility with rabbits and eggs and whatnot.

And I don’t think that Mary rode on a donkey because if you have ever seen a woman who is nine months pregnant try to get up on a horse like my wife did when we were on a missions trip to that Colorado dude ranch (which I had planned for two years and wasn’t about to cancel just because she was about to pop) well you’d know that no woman would be able to ride a donkey for ninety miles without losing her sanctification which there’s no record of her doing in this story.

Well, I was going to share with you what Christmas is really about but it looks like we’re out of time. Please turn in your hymnbooks to number 689 “We’re Sure We Know What Christmas Wasn’t But Forget Quite What it Was”