December 26 is “boxing day” and has been since… since… we’re not sure. Apparently the first definitive reference is from England in the 1830s but it must have started earlier or there’d have been nothing to refer to.

As to why it’s boxing day, all enthusiasts for the “sweet science” put down your gloves. It’s because before it was Dec. 26, “boxing day” was the first weekday after Christmas and was a holiday on which servants of various sorts including postmen and errand boys received a “Christmas box” from their employers or patrons.

In that form it’s a great deal older than the early 19^th century; Samuel Pepys refers to it in his diary in December 1663. And it wasn’t new then; since before there were dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and that sort of thing servants of the wealthy were expected to attend to their masters on Christmas Day itself, they got the next day off to visit family and would receive boxes with gifts, money and sometimes leftover food.

Leftover food might seem kind of grubby. But remember, there weren’t refrigerators then either, meaning not only the stuff would spoil but also that the poor, even the decently employed, generally had fairly monotonous diets. Especially if a thoughtful master or mistress took care to see that there were some good leftovers, it would have been a spectacular treat.

Nowadays, of course, the pile of presents is bigger and the gadgets and goodies are far “better” than the wooden toys and nuts that might have been in such a box. And we’ve done away with servants and informal obligations in favour of unionization and automation. And holidays don’t just grow up informally; they’re officially declared. For instance in South Africa in 1994 Boxing Day was renamed Day of Goodwill with, I can’t help thinking, an immediate and measurable decline in that quality. Moreover we now celebrate Boxing Day with an orgy of shopping even though we just got presents the day before because we are so progressive and prosperous and things just happen so wonderfully fast.

Somehow I feel just a bit wistful for a Victorian or even Samuel Pepys boxing day, though.

On December 25^th of the year 0 Jesus of Nazareth was almost certainly not born. Scholars have expended much ingenuity on the question when exactly he was born, using a very few specific dates in the Gospels and in non-Christian sources some of which are themselves maddeningly vague or unreliable. But it’s still Christmas today.

As to the year, the problem with 0 in brief is that Herod died in 4 B.C. and he’s pretty important to the story. So people have done various calculations about when the Temple rebuilding was begun and John the Baptist and Tiberius and so on and decided they were confused about when Jesus was born, when he died, and everything in between. (They’re also not entirely sure when Pilate stepped down; it’s not just Jesus or the Baptist shrouded in historical mist here.)

The argument respecting the date of Dec. 25 is primarily that shepherds wouldn’t have been grazing their sheep at that time of year. I’m no agronomist and I don’t know what you did with sheep in Roman Palestine in December since they had to eat something and there may have been no hay, which I don’t even know if sheep eat anyway. (The Internet says they do. But Freeman Dyson says hay was invented in the Dark Ages so it’s moot… unless he’s wrong; another source cites Pliny on how to cut hay.)

The secondary argument is that the Christians took over a pagan Winter solstice festival on a kind of “if you can’t beat them” piece of cunning appropriation. Which may contain a profound seed of truth.

December, you may have noticed, is cold and dark and just getting colder. But in a compelling promise of rebirth, the days start getting longer. It’s just one miraculous aspect of life on Earth that the cold and dark aren’t synchronized, and thank goodness. And of course you can explain why not using physics and be right. But still, being able to explain a phenomenon through science isn’t the same as explaining why the science works the way it does.

It could be more boring, predictable, empty and discouraging and equally logical. But it’s not. Life, for all its grimness, isn’t like that. And the essential message of Christmas is of a small, unlikely hope that warms our hearts and fills us with joy.

Easter is the big deal, the death and resurrection, the dramatic conclusion to the story. But Christmas is a small, hauntingly profound miracle that starts it off and sets the strange, wonderful, sublime tone.

The Christian story is remarkable among religions in that it features God not hurling thunderbolts or blasting cities but as a helpless baby. It says not just that there is virtue in kindness to the small but that there is holiness beyond measure in the humble and the weak. The “small still voice” Elijah hears in 1 Kings 11-12 prefigures it (“And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:/ And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”) But now it has become a baby’s coo and it turned the world upside down.

The gifts of the Magi signify that Christ is God (frankincense), King (gold) and Sacrifice (myrrh). But before all that, he’s a baby in his mother’s arms, as improbable and wonderful as anything in the whole Gospel.

I do not begrudge the scholars their work. Historical truth is important. But the deeper truth is that Christmas belongs on Dec. 25 where it has been for 1800 years.

Rejoice.

On December 24 back in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Merry Christmas Jimmy Carter.

Some doves said the invasion would prove to be the Soviets’ Vietnam. It seemed awfully feeble at the time, as did Carter’s response; among the results of this invasion was to doom Carter against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 U.S. presidential election. And yet in retrospect there was some truth to the “Soviet Vietnam” claim. Just not enough.

The invasion was the first open use of Soviet troops outside the areas conquered by the Red Army in the closing stages of World War II. In fact they had been in action in other theatres, including aerial combat against Israel over Suez in the “War of Attrition” from 1967-1970. But there had always been some pretense of serving as advisors, in purely defensive roles etc. Afghanistan was an invasion, and it helped persuade people the U.S.S.R. was aggressive.

Moreover, the Soviets were supposedly invited in by the radical government of Nur Mohammad Taraki, which had seized power in a 1978 coup. But when they reached Kabul Soviet troops staged another coup, executed Taraki and installed Babrak Karmal. Deposing and killing the guy whose invitation supposedly gave their invasion legitimacy pretty much showed their true colours.

The Soviets went on to wage a ruthless war in which large-scale civilian casualties were apparently regarded as operational goals rather than deplorable collateral damage, further undermining their reputation among people who had spent much of the previous decade and a half criticizing American foreign policy as brutal and hypocritical. So in all these ways the invasion did help stiffen Western resolve.

Even Carter’s apparently feeble response, accompanied by baffled and feeble rhetoric, had more sting in it than it seemed to. Boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics dealt a serious prestige blow to a regime that, while seeming to scorn the world’s good opinion, actually craved it. And the grain embargo, by upsetting the fragile and cynical bargain in which Russians got a gradually better standard of living in return for an ongoing seedy denial of freedom, helped undermine the Soviet regime.

So did its inability to pacify the Soviet countryside despite its willingness to engage in atrocities. The Soviets were respected for their strength more than anything else, indeed for little else. Including by cowed Western intellectuals who pretended their motivation was more elevated. So if they weren’t strong, they were nothing.

To be sure, the Afghan involvement wasn’t fatal in itself. The Soviet economy was also in terminal condition. And without Reagan, and Thatcher, and John Paul II, and Solidarity in Poland, the regime might have lurched on for another decade beyond its actual collapse in 1991. But it was already quite decrepit. And that undermines the “Soviet Vietnam” thesis because a more robust but equally evil regime might have rolled right over the Afghan resistance, depopulated the countryside and called it peace. Stalin, with the Soviet economy of 1952, might well have done so.

Finally, it is worth noting that the resistance the Soviet invasion aroused, and hardened in battle, and that Reagan helped arm especially with missiles capable of downing Soviet helicopter gunships, turned into the Taliban. So if Afghanistan was a critical defeat for the Soviets, it was not a victory for the world.

Thus the argument that cruel power was ultimately self-defeating, that the West didn’t really need to worry about the invasion because it would prove a quagmire, turned out to be fatuous in the short run, plausible in the medium run, and fatuous again in the long run.

On December 23, back in 1888, Vincent van Gogh chopped off his ear. What a loser.

I know, I know. That’s not how it’s normally seen. Instead he was a sensitive, tortured genius, driven to it by the complacent indifference of bourgeois society that wouldn’t know art if it jumped out of a bush and hit them over the head. Which you get the feeling a lot of artists would actually like to do, given the willfully offensive ugliness of their work which they shrilly insist we aren’t allowed to notice, mention or resent.

Perhaps I digress, given that van Gogh’s work is not on the whole ugly. It’s bold and unconventional, at least by the standards of the late 19^th century. Today it would probably be considered “unconventional” due to its lack of excrement and rubbish that with surprising frequency leads art exhibits to be thrown out by cleaning staff with more taste than the artists, the connoisseurs or the government funding agencies. Which is another way of saying I like it.

I don’t like him, though. Cutting off your ear is just bad. Self-mutilation, even as a cry for help, is a failure to cope. It’s not a mark of genius, even if you are a genius, any more than being an alcoholic is a sign of genius if you are both, or a sign of superior sensitivity that can’t handle the world’s coarseness. We’re all in the same world. We all have issues. But those of us who don’t slice off bits of our own heads are not lesser beings for it.

As biologist Peter Medawar once noted (it was my August 14 Quotation of the Day), “If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.” Nor if a historian did so, or a journalist, or a construction worker or anyone else. And rightly not.

So thanks for the sunflowers, Vince. But not for the example.

On December 22, 1775, the Continental Congress created the first American navy. And significantly they made Esek Hopkins, Esq. Commander in Chief.

OK, that wasn’t significant. I never heard of him and I’ve taught this stuff at university. He evidently made rather a botched job of it, or so the Continental Congress thought, although given the scale of the task and the pitiful resources available I think they were a bit hard on him.

So did the citizens of his native Rhode Island, where he was elected to the Assembly several times before retiring. And there is at least one school named after him, in Providence. But enough of Hopkins, or perhaps too much.

What I do think is significant is that on scraping together a “fleet” of four converted merchantmen and ordering Hopkins somehow to best the mighty British navy, the Congress named their first flagship Alfred. As in Alfred of Wessex, Alfred of the Cakes, Alfred the Great, the famous English king. And there’s a famous illustration of the Alfred flying the Grand Union flag, the same one Washington flew at Valley Forge, with 13 stripes for the 13 colonies and, in the corner, why, the Union Jack (pre-1801 version, without St. Patrick’s cross).

The point is that it was their traditional liberties, not some novel set, and their ancient Constitution, not some brilliant innovation, for which the rebels were fighting. There was, and is, some confusion on this point, especially by those who think the point of the Revolution was to get rid of a hereditary king and have equality and democracy.

In fact it was to get rid of a king who was refusing to be bound by the constitutional limits that made him a constitutional monarch, in order to preserve liberty and self-government in the sense of a popular veto on ambitious government plans, not an endless series of ambitious government plans legitimized by popular consent.

It was to preserve, not overthrow, and to remain British even if the British themselves were drifting away from their roots. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this point.

As for Esek Hopkins, enough said. And then some.

On December 21 1957 Charles de Gaulle was elected first president of the Fifth Republic of France. What an annoying man.

De Gaulle had a very impressive career, from certain angles. He was a decorated officer in World War I and, captured at Verdun leading a desperate breakout charge after being stunned by a shell, bayoneted and gassed, tried to escape several times. He also deserves full credit for having tried, as a staff officer in the 1930s, to persuade his superiors of the importance of mobile armored warfare. Sadly his 1934 book Vers l'Armée de Métier was ignored in France but read carefully by, among others, Adolph Hitler in Germany. He even tried to conjure up armoured counterattacks during the Battle for France and was promoted to brigadier-general but it was too little too late.

I also credit him for refusing to accept surrender, escaping to Britain and organizing the Free French. And there the good news stops.

He was an insufferable wartime partner, refusing to accept that France had lost and expecting to be treated as an equal by Churchill, Roosevelt and even Stalin. The English-speaking leaders humoured him, having better things to do than fall out with the icon of French determination, but not always with good humour. He was arrogant, peremptory and unreasonable on principle. He even refused to broadcast support for the Normandy Landings on D-Day, leaving U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall incandescent with rage. FDR wanted the British to arrest him and Churchill said, half in jest, “We call him Joan of Arc, and we’re looking for some bishops to burn him.”

His political career fizzled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But as the Fourth Republic disintegrated and a revolt in Algeria menaced France’s position as an Empire, such as it was, de Gaulle was the indispensable man and was summoned back into public life. What good did he do?

He famously went to Algeria and told the die-hards “Je vous ai compris”. But he was lying, if realistically, because there was no alternative to Algerian independence. But beyond that, what did he really do for France?

His embrace of central planning, to the point of France having five year plans, was snootily disdainful of Anglo-Saxon individualism. But while dirigisme achieved some superficially impressive results in the aftermath of the Marshall Plan, especially in high-profile engineering-intensive megaprojects, it saddled France with sluggish growth of productivity and high unemployment made that much more intractable by the illusion that state intervention had worked in de Gaulle’s glorious years.

His most annoying act, in my view, was pulling France out of NATO’s integrated command in 1966, and ordering foreign forces out of France, prompting U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s bitter question whether that included the Americans buried in Normandy. De Gaulle went even further, announcing an “in all directions” nuclear defence strategy in 1967 that, if it meant anything, meant he was as ready for an American-British attack as a Soviet one.

Now I’m trying to be fair here. De Gaulle did get nuclear weapons for France, and insisted on above-air testing long after the others had agreed to stop. And the West was rather well served in deterring the Soviets by having multiple nuclear centres including a very unpredictable one in France. But on the whole de Gaulle didn’t seem to know who his friends were which helped reduce their number. By 1968 he was plumb out and retired again, this time for good.

His presidency was characterised by what observers called a “politique de grandeur,” a conviction that France could be a great power merely by being snooty, obnoxious and insolent, as he had been during the Second World War. As Richard Nixon noted in his book Real Peace, De Gaulle once wrote that “France is never her true self except when she is engaged in a great enterprise.” And he seemed to think he carried with him in his pocket wherever he went and had merely to assert it to make it so.

Indeed, de Gaulle has the odd distinction of having made himself the target of a sizzling bon mot by Nixon, a man not given to such things: that de Gaulle had a vision that spanned centuries but unfortunately he was looking in the wrong direction.

Both parts are true. As a result, France is not better off for having had him as their president. Quite the reverse.

On Dec. 20, 1957 Elvis Presley was drafted. It’s the sort of thing it is hard to see ending well. Surely someone could have taken the U.S. Army aside and said listen, everyone is expected to sacrifice for their nation, but a rock and roll star nicknamed “Elvis the Pelvis” cannot be soldier material.

Actually a lot of fans did write to the army saying precisely that. But Elvis, a fine if usually somewhat bewildered man, wouldn’t hear of it. He got a deferment to finish a film, a rare excuse but a solid one, and then showed up in Memphis to be inducted as a private, turning down army offers to be a Special Services entertainer.

It didn’t end well. Unlike Jimi Hendrix, who was given a choice of jail for car theft or enlistment in 1961 and successfully trained as a paratrooper but was honourably discharged on the manifestly justified grounds of “unsuitability” a year later, Elvis served out his time reasonably well, even reaching the rank of sergeant. Incidentally www.history.com reports that “After he got his polio shot from an army doctor on national TV, vaccine rates among the American population shot from 2 percent to 85 percent by the time of his discharge on March 2, 1960.” He really was such a nice boy.

When he left the army he was asked about his decision not to take the easy entertainer route and replied, “Actually, that's the only way it could be. People were expecting me to mess up, to goof up in one way or another. They thought I couldn't take it and so forth, and I was determined to go to any limits to prove otherwise, not only to the people who were wondering, but to myself”.

Unfortunately while he was in the army somebody introduced him to amphetamines to stay alert on maneuvers. And barbiturates. And karate. The karate was OK. But the other two began a long history of drug problems that, indeed, did not end well, contributing to his death at age 42.

I do not say he would have avoided these problems if he hadn’t been drafted. Indeed, his military career turned out a lot better for the army than you might have expected watching him perform, say, Jailhouse Rock in 1957. But it didn’t end well and honestly, there’s just no way you can say “Let’s draft Elvis” and expect anything else.

On this day in history, Dec. 19 1998, Bill Clinton was impeached. And it couldn’t have happened to a more suitable candidate. Not even Andrew Johnson.

People sometimes get confused and think impeachment is when a president, or other official, is removed from office. It’s not, at least not in the American and a number of other systems. There it’s like a grand jury indictment, following which they are tried either by a court or, as in the United States, by a different legislative body.

In the United States, the House of Representatives impeached Clinton, as it had Andrew Johnson 130 years earlier. And the Senate then acquitted him, as it had Johnson. But Johnson was impeached on a technicality by his partisan foes whose real objection was that he was the worst president in history at a critical time in that history (which he was, a point to bear in mind next time an incumbent Republican is casually labeled the worst ever). Had I been there, I believe I would have held my nose and voted to acquit.

Clinton was a whole other story. He misused the powers of his office and committed flagrant perjury. And he was saved only by a mindless, belligerent closing of ranks by his own party. The House indicted him on two charges and voted down two others. But every single Democratic Senator voted to acquit on both charges although many knew, and some publicly said, that he was guilty. Republicans, meanwhile, were divided, albeit unevenly; four voted to acquit on both charges, one voted “not proven” on both, and five voted to convict on the perjury count and acquit on obstruction of justice.

When people complain that politics has become nastier and more partisan in the United States it is only partly true. Things were very bad in Andrew Johnson’s day, and a great deal worse a decade or so earlier, and they were pretty nasty at other times as well. But to the extent that it is true, too little attention goes, I feel, to those senators who decided that perjury, sexual harassment, lies and generally disgusting conduct were just fine if it was one of their guys doing it, especially that sly dog Bill Clinton.

One more gift he gave an unaccountably grateful nation.