It’s a time of reflection and renewal. One semester is over. A fresh new one looms on the horizon.

Pamela, I’ve enjoyed your podcasts and blogs. I’ve learned so much. I like that you aren’t afraid to get into technical detail. I truly appreciated your blogging about religious belief and being a scientist not being contradictory. You’re teaching more than you realize. Thank you.

Regardless of its origins, Christmas is a big day in the Christian calendar. (The name, obviously, means “Christ-Mass”.) I think it really got a move forward – in England, at least – after Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”.

When the Puritans came here, they left the “godless festivities” of British Christmas behind.

In the 1860s, Thomas Nast developed the first public Santa Claus image. (He also developed the political parties’ donkey and elephant.) About 1920, Santa got today’s look.

For a long time, many people observed Christmas the way college students observe any other holiday: with drinking, carousing and carrying on. That was one of the things the Puritans were happy to leave behind. (Assuming there was any such thing as a “happy Puritan”.)

It was in the 1800s that we turned Christmas into a family- and religion-centered holiday. It was made a legal holiday in 1836 and 1838 (Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas – note that they’re all Southern states. Northerners still considered Christmas a little suspect).

I suspect that one reason it’s been so grossly overcommercialized is that much of the country has lost touch with their religious roots.

Some out there may think of Odin when giving gifts, but not me. We’ve taken all those earlier customs and made them our own.

I noticed an interesting tidbit about that “constitutional separation of church and state” (a phrase that appears nowhere in the Constitution, and in fact nowhere in any of the Founding Fathers’ writings, except in one letter of Thomas Jefferson’s): the candidates in the current discussions (you really can’t call them “debates”) are embracing religion to a level unseen before. It may be that that’s because two of them are quite religious, but I don’t think so. I think it’s because of the usual Democrats’ way of grabbing on to anything the public is attached to and trying to make it their own.

Regardless of who wins the scholarly argument, the Christmas connection to the giant ORGY that was Saturnalia is pretty awesome (week long feast celebrating Saturn, God of Chaos). So whenever I celebrate Christmas now, I always think: GIANT ORGY! Which is far more fun than nativity scenes and puts me right in the spirit of things. That, and the Garfield Christmas Special. I defy anyone to watch that and fight off the warm fuzzies successfully.

You seem like a really cool person who’s interested in space, science, and cynicism (always healthy). You probably would be really cool to meet in person. Maybe that day will happen, but not any time soon.

Right now I’m in the middle of a “war”–no not Iraq. My war is with the particle physicists. Honestly, I don’t have a qualm with them, but I’m putting forward a new model that curdles their milk. Basically, my new model accepts all the experiment stuff they’ve come up with & all the observational stuff all you space-people have come up with, yet is totally incompatible with the old theories used to describe things, from CPT-Violation on.

The war is raging on my Scientific American blog site: http://science-community.sciam.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300005599

I invite you to check it out. I expected the particle guys to be mad because I’m also advocating to shut down their biggest projects. I don’t expect the space-folks to be as threatened. Think about it: with the particle folks shut down, the money that would have gone to them will likely go to you.

I need a little support in this “war.” Although the full model is on Amazon, you can download the half-model for free off of either hasanuddin.net or hasanuddin.org (but I’m not sure how, I still have to talk with my webdesigner) Exact info on how to download a free copy of the model is contained in comments section of the first blog, in response to the 8th comment.