Christmas at Christmas With Christmas

Spending Christmas at Christmas with Christmas sounds a very Puffin thing to do. First of all, we’ll have to decide when to meet. The eagle-eyed among you may point out that we’ve missed our chance, given that the festivities have passed and we are now 360-plus sleeps away from the next special day.

They are too fussy, or rather not fussy enough, as the true pedant will point out that the gospel writers weren’t keeping a ship’s log, rather telling an important moral and religious tale, with dates being somewhat flexible. St Mark and St John introduce us to Jesus as an adult being baptised by his cousin John the Baptist.

St Matthew tells of wise men following a star and King Herod’s massacre of his would-be rivals, but it is St Luke who gives the full bells and smells, or rather, shepherds, angels and no room at the inn. But he doesn’t furnish an exact date. Reference to shepherds in fields in the middle of the night might suggest lambing time, well after the end of December.

The process isn’t aided by St Luke’s placing Quirinius as governor of Syria, despite historians telling us his biblical contemporary Herod had died before Quirinius was appointed.

Might that star help? Perhaps the Star of Bethlehem wasn’t a single star but a powerful astronomical event? Leading theories point to significant planetary conjunctions, especially a rare close alignment of Jupiter and Venus in 2 BC, or a triple conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars around 7 and 6 BC, with these celestial events interpreted by the Wise Men as astrological signs for the birth of a king.

The astronomy department at G-P inform me the Jupiter–Venus coming together took place in June. As for the triple conjunction, that places Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction on May 29th, September 29th and December 5th, 7 BC, with Mars joining to make a triple conjunction on February 6th, 6 BC.

Without a whiff of December 25th, perhaps we should look away from the heavens and towards an alignment of hijackable popular pagan Roman midwinter festivals? These included Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Birth of the Unconquered Sun) and Saturnalia. Early Christian writers dated Jesus’s conception to March 25th (the Annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Mary), close to the spring equinox. Adding nine months led to a December 25th birth.

Again, rather than a ship’s log, these are moral and religious interpretations based upon new life and a light to a world in darkness.
The Roman Church formalised celebrating Christmas on December 25th at around AD 336, during Emperor Constantine’s reign. Having said that, the Eastern churches use the Julian calendar, which places Christmas on January 7th.

Having (sort of) allowed ourselves permission to decide our own date, where shall we meet? There is a Christmas, Florida, population 1,310. It was named thus on December 25, 1837, when a force of 2,000 US Army soldiers and Alabama Volunteers arrived in the area to construct a fort, which they named Fort Christmas. The fort was one of over 200 forts built during the Second Seminole War – the Seminoles being the collective name for various tribes of Indians thereabouts.

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal — *The uninspiring Fort Christmas, Christmas, Florida*
© Google Street View 2025, Google.com

There is also a Christmas, Michigan, once the site of a giant factory making holiday-themed products, hence the name. Julius Thorson, of Munising, built the factory in 1938, but it burned down in 1940.
Exotic islands fare little better. Discovered by James Cook on Christmas Eve 1777, Christmas Island in the Pacific is the world’s largest atoll, but was used for hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s.

Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean was discovered on that day in 1643 by Captain William Mynors of the British East India Company. However, the first recorded landing was by William Dampier and his crew in 1688. Since then, it’s been mined for phosphates, bombed by the Japanese and used as a Rwandan-style deterrent for illegal immigrants to Australia.

Moving rapidly on, might we switch languages? There is a Natal (natalis dies = “day of birth”) in Gio Grande state, Brazil, which looks a bit rough.

Perhaps Puffins would prefer the one in South Africa? Sounds a better fit. Discovered by Vasco da Gama on Christmas Day, 1497, it was he who coined the name Terra Natalis (Christmas Land). Interestingly, it wasn’t until 100 years later that Bantu migrants formed themselves into a single clan in the territory, now known as the Zulus.

The Indian Ocean coastline of Natal runs for 360 miles from Port Edward to Kosi Bay, but I have somewhere inland in mind. Before that big reveal, we have to decide which Christmas we shall spend Christmas with at Christmas.

From my childhood, I can recall a barrister called Christmas Humphries but, on further examination, it was he who led the prosecution of Timothy Evans, hanged for the crimes committed by another man, John Christie, regarding the notorious Rillington Place murders. Likewise, Humphries helped send Derek Bentley to the gallows, whose guilt and alleged ‘joint enterprise’ with cop-killer Christopher Craig hinged around an interpretation of Bentley’s ‘let him have it’ cry as Craig fatally shot Police Constable Sidney Miles during a burglary in 1952.

He also had Ruth Ellis hanged – the last woman executed in Britain – despite the homicide being of her abusive lover, David Blakely. No matter which side of the capital punishment argument you take, Humphries’s prosecutions were problematic and contributed to the abolition of hanging.

All a bit of a dampener at Christmas, even one next to the Indian Ocean on a sunny mid-summer’s South African day.

Added to which, Humphries wasn’t born on or near Christmas, rather the name was passed down through the family – perhaps as a retained maiden name. For there is a Christmas surname in the south-east of England with, according to the ancestral heat map of such things available on the internet, an outpost of Christmases around Gloucester.

As for well-known people born on Christmas Day, we are spoilt for choice; Annie Lennox, Sissy Spacek, Isaac Newton, Dorothy Wordsworth, Humphrey Bogart, camp Quentin Crisp, even camper Justin Trudeau.

One advantage to our purpose of being born at Christmas is that you may be blessed with that moniker. After the disappointment of Christmas Humphries, we must turn, as with Natal, to a foreign language, in this case, French. Noel Edmonds was born on 22nd December. Close enough. That’s decided then. Show of hands? Oh, dear. Poor Noel. Not to worry, we can do better.

There is another Noel, or rather a Noele, actually born on Christmas Day. Camper than Quentin Crisp and Justin Trudeau multiplied by the speed of light squared – step forward and take a bow, Miss Noele Gordon, a brighter star over Crossroads than ever shone above Bethlehem, and who was born on just the right day in 1919. That’s decided then.

As we discovered with Herod, Quirinius and the alignment of the planets, such things as dates are somewhat flexible. As Puffins are great believers in better times, and Miss Gordon is currently 107 and dead, we shall meet in Natal in the 1950s.

In a decision that makes itself, as only one Christmas Day in that decade fell on a Friday, we shall meet on Friday 25th December 1953 at 6 pm, the faggotry hour. Our host will be Nolly Gordon. The precise location? As Christianity is currently under siege, we shall gather at Ladysmith, famous for its 118-day siege lifted in February 1900. While we’re over there, might we set about decolonising the place of Africans and handing it back to the Portuguese?