Welcome to The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, the atheist book it’s safe to leave around your granny. Here, you’ll find no chapters titled ‘666 Ways to Diss the Pope’, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Church Graffiti’, or ‘How to Bash the Bishop’. There’s only one joke about Islamic fundamentalists, coming up now:
Q: Why was Abu Hamza a rubbish receptionist?
A: Because the phone was always off the hook*
and an undecided number of jokes about agnostics† (we wanted to write some, but we weren’t sure, and then we thought we might, but we weren’t certain).
*Abu Hamza was indeed a receptionist in a West London hotel in 1983. This was before he had a hook, but let’s not pull apart a joke that wasn’t fit for a Christmas cracker to start with.
† For the purposes of this Christmas book, they should henceforth be known as ‘eggnogstics’.
THE ATHEIST’S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS
What you will find are forty-two* brilliant contributions from the world’s most entertaining atheist scientists, comedians, philosophers and writers, who have all donated their time, thought and jokes for free to help you enjoy Christmas.
Maybe you bought this book for yourself, or perhaps there’s a price sticker over the ‘A’ of ‘Atheist’ and your devout great-aunt bought it for you, hoping to make you more religious. Either way, all royalties are going straight to the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity, Terrence Higgins Trust, so to whoever bought it: thank you. (What do you mean, you haven’t bought it yet and you’re still loitering in the bookshop reading this with your grubby thumbs on the pages? Take it to the counter this instant!)
Whenever I read book introductions, I start bellowing internally, ‘Shut up and let me get on with the book!’ So I hope you enjoy every page, and that you have a truly excellent Christmas.
ARIANE SHERINE
*Because forty-two, as explained in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. If you haven’t yet read it, you might want to buy it along with this book. Although the sales assistant may then think you only buy books with the title format The _____ Guide to ______.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
MARK TWAIN
It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas
ED BYRNE
‘I’ve already done all my Christmas shopping for this year. I bought all my aunties socks and Y-fronts. See how they like it.’
For many years, that was my only Christmas joke. Seeing as Christmas can be quite a lucrative time for a jobbing comic, a time when you can get paid two or even three times your normal fee in compensation for having to entertain people who are two or even three times more drunk and rowdy than normal, you would think I would have written a slew of seasonal zingers to keep the paper-hatted hordes chuckling into their lukewarm mulled wine. But I never did. I would kick off with my little morsel of Christmas humbuggery and then carry straight on with my usual cavalcade of jokes about smoking, drinking and slagging off Alanis Morissette. Why, I imagine you’re wondering, was this so? Why would somebody who, particularly in his early circuit days, was so eager to churn out crowd-pleasing material not hit that stage with an arsenal of Yuletide yuk-yuks? Surely someone with such a pragmatic approach to comedy would have at least a solid five minutes of holiday-based lateral thinking thrown into a box of sarcasm, wrapped in whimsy paper all tied up in the pink bow of impeccable timing? But no.
The reason for this is simple: I have always found it easier to write jokes about things I hate, and I don’t hate Christmas. Sure, there’s been some dodgy stuff left for me under the tree over the years. ‘Oh, did Santa run out of Scalextric sets? Well, I suppose Tamyanto make one just as good.’ The Santa Claus that came to our house did not believe in paying for advertising. As I grew older and Santa was replaced by my parents, they continued in this vein. Maybe they were early anti-globalisation activists and thought they should boycott major bicycle manufacturers like Raleigh or Dawes. Maybe that’s why at the age of fourteen I was the proud owner of the only Orbita 10-speed in all of North County Dublin.
It wasn’t that my folks were being cheap. They were just doing their bit to fight the power of Big Bike. I’m not saying that Orbita don’t make a quality product, but I can’t help but think that they could have built up much better word-of-mouth if they hadn’t sold my dad a bike with two right pedals. Yes. Two right pedals. When it comes to bicycle pedals, two rights make a wrong. He did try to return the bike a couple of days later, but found out the hard way that a gift shop that wasn’t there before December 1st won’t be there after December 24th. Well, I say he found out the hard way. He wasn’t the one pedalling to school with only one foot. By the time I was fourteen, I was so asymmetrically developed it took all my concentration not to walk in a circle.
Crappy presents notwithstanding, I’ve always been a big Christmas mush, enjoying the sentimentality of the season. New Year, I’ve always felt, can go and shite. Maybe that’s because as a kid I always used to babysit the neighbours’ kids so that the neighbours could go to a party at my parents’ house. But Christmas has always been my favourite time of the year. Even going to mass—a pastime I obviously have little love for if I’m included in this book—was more fun on Christmas Day because we all got to look at each other in our Christmas clothes. Those of us who got decent trendy-looking ones getting to point and laugh uproariously at the chunky-knit efforts of those less fortunate. This was one aspect of Christmas where my mother never let me down. We couldn’t afford Armani, but at least I never had to endure the humiliation of a reindeer on my jumper at age thirteen.
So Christmas has always been in my cool book. I’ve always found it easier to make fun of holidays like Halloween, which must be a very difficult time for paedophiles that are really trying to shake the habit. Imagine! You’ve got the urges. You know it’s wrong, so you lock yourself in the house out of harm’s way. October 31st rolls around and kids are knocking the door down. All of them dressed in cute little outfits, asking for sweets. You don’t even have to offer. Sweets are being requested. That’s almost entrapment, if you ask me.
However, much like everything else since I hit my thirties, certain things are beginning to annoy me about my favourite holiday. Sure, there are the usual headaches that just come as you get older. Not enough time to go shopping. Swearing that next year you won’t leave it too late to do it online. Trying to come to a compromise with your wife regarding whose family you should spend it with. Yours, hers, or perhaps some neutral family that you both loathe equally. Everything gets more complicated as you get older, and the responsibilities of adulthood are always going to do their best to choke the living joy out of any occasion. I’m not really talking about that. I’m talking about something that I used to find exciting about Christmas as a youngster but as an older man I just