Christmas, eh? Goodwill to all men?

Bollocks, more like – not historically, at any rate. And let’s face it, Herod’s massacre of the innocents was hardly a great start, was it? Following that, we had this little lot:

800 – Christmas Day – Charlemagne has himself crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor, the result of thirty solid years of warfare

1066 – Christmas Day – William the Bastard is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, becoming William the Conqueror in the process, and kicking off a good three centuries of sporadic warfare within what is now the United Kingdom – first suppressing the Saxons, then the Welsh and Scots

1261 – Christmas Day – 11-year-old Emperor John IV of Nicea blinded and deposed by Michael Palaiologos

1481 – Boxing Day – The Battle of Westbroek (Holland vs. Utrecht)

1715 – Christmas Eve – As part of the Great Northern War Swedish troops occupy Norway (and Sweden was, at the time, at war with the United Kingdom, Hanover, Russia, Prussia, Saxony and Denmark – good work…)

1776 – Boxing Day – The (first) Battle of Trenton – the American revolutionaries defeat us proud Brits

1793 – Boxing Day – Battle of Geisberg – the French defeat the Austrians. War continues pretty much uninterrupted for another 22 years nonetheless…

1806 – Boxing Day – Battle of Pultusk and Battle of Golymin – both France vs. Russia, total casualties estimated to be around 13,000

1862 – Boxing Day – The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou begins, kicking off Union General Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign against the Confederates along the Mississippi. It’s safe to say that quite a few died over the coming months… (The same day, Mankato, Minnesota saw 32 Native Americans hanged, in the country’s largest ever mass execution. Christmas spirit, eh?)

1865 – Christmas Eve – that lovely, loving organisation the Ku Klux Klan is formed

1932 – Christmas Day – seemingly annoyed at allowing mankind have all the killing fun, God sets off a great big earthquake in Gansu, China, killing 70,000 (12 years after another earthquake there had killed 120,000. Nice guy, God…)

1941 – Christmas Eve – after 18 days of fighting (with about 8,500 killed) Japan occupies Hong Kong ; the same day they also take Kuching in Malaysia

1943 – Boxing Day – after being hit by the HMS Norfolk and HMS Duke of York, the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst sinks, with the loss of 1,932 lives

1944 – Boxing Day – a German counter-attack kicks of the Battle of Bastogne. When it finally ends three weeks later, between 25,000 and 75,000 had lost their lives

1953 – Christmas Eve – God has a bash again, with the Tangiwai Distaster in New Zealand – 153 losing their lives

1974 – Christmas Day – God gets in on it once more, as Cyclone Tracy pretty much destroys Darwin, Australia

1979 – Christmas Eve – The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. And, as we know all too well, the aftermath is arguably still being felt to this day. The Soviets lost around 30,000 men during their nine year occupation. No one knows how many Afghans died – either during the Soviet occupation, or during the two civil wars that followed their withdrawal in February 1989, and lasted until the Taleban takeover in 1996

1989 – Christmas Day – sixteen years and one week to the day before the country joins the EU on 1st January 2007, Romania decides that the best way to move from dictatorship to democracy is to execute their former dicator and his wife after a brief show trial

1997 – Christmas Eve – The Sid El-Antri massacre sees between 50 and 120 people killed by terrorists in Algeria

2003 – Boxing Day – God gets in on the act yet again, killing tens of thousands with a devastating earthquake in Iran

2004 – Boxing Day – God evidently had such fun the year before, he decides to kill another 230,000 with a great big tsunami (but he is a loving God, let’s not forget, and he did give up his only begotten son to die for all our sins, after all…)

Peace on Earth? Goodwill to all men? Humbug… If even the big bloke in the sky can’t refrain from raining down natural disasters around the time of his boy’s birth, what hope is there that us mere mortals can refrain from killing each other?

(This has been a partly political broadcast on behalf of the Cynical-Pretty-Much-Atheists Party, whose sole member is now going to bugger off for a few days to indulge in fine food and vast quantities of booze… Have fun, folks…)