On the same basis, nice men in Nigeria offer to give us lots of money if we give them our bank details. People want to believe this, despite the fact it is clearly untrue.

It may be worth recalling here that there is no historical evidence linking the birth of Christ to the 25 December but that date is conveniently near the locus for several separate traditions of pre-Christian pagan festivals relating to the winter solstice and the Roman feast of Saturnalia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia

My guess is that the early Christian church latched on to the date of 25 December as a piece of astute marketing.

When I lived and worked in Scotland in the early 1960s, Christmas day, by tradition, was a full working day. The seasonal holiday was Hogmanay. Nowadays, the Scots make holidays of both Christmas and Hogmanay.

I’m a right winger, and I know that the True Meaning of Christmas is the Doctor Who special. So there.

For most right-wingers that certainly seems to be true.

While I agree with your thoughts on the crowd’s mentality, they are actually proved correct in the end………

This doesn’t seem to prove your point very well.

Because it feeds into a predefined narrative of white/Christian victimhood.

Amusingly enough as church attendances slide and the cult of dawkins grows, this bullshit is one of the few traditions there is at Christmas.

“When did you stop beating your wife” is the canonical loaded question. I’m surprised you’ve never heard it before. I’m also not sure why you consider it sexist.

The informal fallacy of plurium interrogationum, or in layman’s terms, a loaded question.

Remember, making up stories about Political Correctness Gone Mad is the True Meaning Of Christmas(tm).

try it this way round:

“have you ever been caught beating your wife?”

“certainly not!”

“ah, you must be very good at it then”

etc

Erm…*furrows brows*…what?

I think you guys must really like her as you mention her so often.