In honor of Xmas

Family from overseas coming in semi-unexpectedly and spending a vacation in your house takes up time, you know? I guess it’s something you need to be better prepared for when you live this close to Disney World, but really, it’s time-consuming—and, of course, a few corners end up being cut. For me, one of the cuttable corners is this blog.

But, as penance for being out of contact for so long, a twofer mostly-serious Xmas special!

First: I make it a point to write Christmas as Xmas in most cases. I have two reasons for this. The first is that it annoys a certain sort of people i feel need to be annoyed. (Similar to the reason i don’t capitalize the word i, actually.) The second is that the sort of people who get annoyed by Xmas don’t get that the X stands for both Christ himself (the Greek letter Χ—a.k.a. chi—is the first letter of the Greek word from which we get the English word Christ, and it looks a lot like a Roman-alphabet X) as well as the cross that was a crucial part of his atonement for us.

Second: Some people think it’s way important what color Jesus’s skin was. (Some people have even formed whole churches based on what they think his skin color was!) The truth is, though, that we don’t know the vaguest bit about what he looked like, except maybe that he was probably bipedal—they didn’t have cameras back then, and we don’t have any surviving paintings of him from that time. However, most people from that part of the world have what’s generally called “olive” skin—kind of an in-between skin color. My uncle (a non-practicing Roman Catholic) once offered what I think is a deep insight about this—he said he thinks Jesus had in-between olive skin because that way if it’s important to you that Jesus had light-colored skin, well, that’s kind of light, and if you believe it’s important that Jesus had dark-colored skin, well, it’s kind of dark, too. The most important thing, really, though, is that Jesus lived. The skin color is just accidental.