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CHASKA, Minn. — Sitting on the couch and getting high in their shared two-bedroom apartment, Caitlyn Haseley asked her boyfriend Travis Stallings last night what she thought was a simple question about where he wanted to spend Christmas this year.
Sadly, she was completely unprepared for his response: 20 minutes of explaining the ancient Roman holiday of Saturnalia and its influence on Christmas, all the while completely ignoring the bowl in his hand.
“Jesus wasn’t actually born on December 25th. You know that, right?” Stallings immediately responded, seemingly unaware it was his turn to take a hit even though he was holding the bowl. “Like, if he even existed at all, his birthday isn’t actually in the Bible, and context clues suggest it was probably in Spring anyway.”
After detailing all of the indications that Jesus’s birthday was sometime in the spring while Haseley dutifully waited her turn, he added, “Early Christians picked late December to have a big, important religious holiday because they were trying to convert pagan Romans, and it was a much easier sell if they could just keep celebrating a major holiday in late December.”
As Haseley tried to interrupt to remind him to take a hit or pass the bowl, Stallings only doubled down. “Traditions like giving gifts, singing, lighting candles, feasting… Sound familiar?” he said to a fully checked out Haseley, whose only thoughts centered on how there were still greens left in the bowl not two feet away from her, yet hopelessly out of reach.
“And you might be thinking,” Stallings continued after an amazing 15 minutes of uninterrupted rambling, “if Saturnalia is on the 17th, and goes until the 23rd, doesn’t Christmas being on the 25th destroy that theory?”
“No! It’s actually a confusion of the dates between the Julian calendar and the old pre-Julian Roman calendar,” Stallings said, incorrectly.
While Haseley’s clueless boyfriend told her a bunch of information she would never remember even if she cared, her mind took her to all sorts of glorious places — like what would happen if gingerbread cookie people had existential crises, whether she should make a watermelon bong for her Boxing Day party, and how glassblowers put all the different colors in the bowls they create — including one tangent when Stallings lectured about Clementine, or Constantine, or maybe Ovaltine, and Haseley tried to remember the last time she had any Ovaltine.
As Stallings found his sixth wind and added, “And Saturnalia is actually — probably — based on the Greek holiday of Kronia,” Haseley left the room, took a quick bong rip, decided she would just go to her parents’ house for Christmas, and went to bed.
Reports show that while Haseley was asleep, Stallings texted her Wikipedia entries on all of his references with the note, “Just fyi.”
Bradley Machov is a writer and improviser in Minneapolis, MN. Follow him on Twitter @bradleymachov
