It's that time of year. Everything is red, green and white, there's a minty smell in the air, Mariah Carey is put on repeat and everyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas is pushed aside for a while in the name of commercialism.

Those who celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday often view this night as one of the most holy nights of the year, and since I'm no longer allowed to say this stuff in church anymore, allow me to explain why everything you love about Christmas is just about as un-Christian as you can get.

For starters, the date itself immediately strikes as strange. December 25 is regarded as the day that Jesus was born (or at least close to the date), but this is entirely false. No one knows when Jesus was born. The reason Christmas is around this time is actually because of the Romans. The Romans celebrated a holiday called "Saturnalia," and it was about as un-Christmas as you could get. There was drinking, wild partying, lots of sex and even quite a few cross-dressers. When the early Church began to spread across Europe, they found that these Pagan traditions had caught on with the rest of the population. Not eager to get in a huge fight, they claimed that Jesus had been born around these holidays, officially making these events Christian. However, it was still a wild and dangerous affair, and many people looked down on the holiday.

One of the chief traditions was that the drunks would crown a beggar as their king. The beggar would then lead his entourage of blind drunks through the streets, knocking on the doors of rich people and demanding to be let in and be served. If the rich refused, they would often be beaten. Christmas was so wild that the Puritans banned the holiday entirely when they moved to America.

Contrary to popular belief, Christmas is still celebrated vastly differently throughout the world, but Christmas in America was rather ignored as a holiday. In fact, until the influx of immigrants began in the 18th to 20th centuries, almost no one celebrated Christmas, and certainly not in the way we do today. Immigrants brought their various traditions with them: Santa Claus from the Dutch, Christmas trees from Germany, caroling from France and all sorts of other strange things we now consider as normal. These traditions meshed until we had what we consider today an "American Christmas."

While Christmas is a wonderful holiday, we need to acknowledge where it's roots are. In reality, the holiday shouldn't even exist because if the Church wanted to squash out these Pagan holidays, they surely would have. So next time you go to church for Christmas Eve, be sure to thank God for the pagans of the past who made this bonanza of winter-cheer possible.