Huh, huh, huh. ‘Tis the season once again and time for my annual salute to Christmas, aka pix of naked dudes in Santa hats. As has become the tradition over the past three years of blogging, ‘cuz math has never been my strong suit I’m once again using the 12 Days of Christmas theme as an excuse for a countdown to the big day when Pattaya sexpats look festive rather than degenerate. Even if they are passed out in a gutter. Again. More importantly (although obviously not quite as popular as the aforementioned naked dudes in Santa hats) each of my 12 Gays of Christmas posts has featured a tale covering a Christmas tradition suitable for retelling to your nieces and nephews to insure you never have to ever spend the holidays around your biological family again.

For the first year I took a look at the origins of some of our more treasured holiday traditions. And trashed the majority of them. “Cuz that’s what Christmas is all about. Last year, spurred by traumatic memories of the terror of being handed over to a fat old man decked out in red by my parents, I posted 12 articles covering other countries’ traditions of terrorizing their children during the holiday season. And it turns out American kiddies really don’t have it so bad. At least death and dismemberment isn’t part of Christmas in the USA. Well, at least not outside of the inner cities. And last year – along with the admirable feat of posting a total of 78 naked holiday studs in one post (set to the tune of the Thai bar boy version of that holiday classic, The 12 Days of Christmas) – I gave ya the incestuous story behind the gift of myrrh, the French Xmas tradition of singing about killing children, and a list of little known facts about the holidays – like that the Germanic word for “mistletoe” literally means ‘dung on a twig’, among other tales and tails to make your season bright.

To date, I’ve posted 256 photos of naked holiday hunks to make yours a cool yule. And since I appreciate tradition almost as much as I do naked hotties, that little bit of yuletide cheer will continue this year. As for a posting theme for the holidays this year, I was stuck between looking at the origins of some of our most beloved Christmas songs and some of the disgusting things people eat for the holidays. Because it turns out there are worse things to show up on your Xmas dinner table than fruitcake. I still haven’t decided which way to go, but since my favorite Christmas ditty is The Christmas Song (aka Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) – at least since James Taylor released his version a few years ago – and since if you’ve ever tried freshly roasted chestnuts, which are not only hot but suck as a snack, I’m starting this year’s holiday posts off by answering the question of why in the hell we associate nuts with Christmas. Not that I don’t enjoy a good sackful throughout the year.

Now obviously you’d think the tie in would be that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus and his have been probably one of the more famous pair of nuts throughout history. Although Chastity Bono gave him a good run for the money a few years back. I mean if it wasn’t for Jesus sporting a pair Mary would have never gotten away with that whole immaculate conception thingy; if she’d given birth to a baby girl instead Joseph would never have bought into her tale about getting knocked up by some supreme being. But instead the origin of nuts as a Christmas tradition can be traced to the Romans – although I guess there is still a bit of a tie-in since a few decades later the Romans had Jesus’ nuts firmly in a vice. But then that’s more about Easter.

According to legend, and Wikipedia, the first mention of nuts and the holidays in history is when Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis sent a present of them to a fellow-writer Juvenal along with a crappy poem that didn’t even rhyme. His gift was a bit of a bitch slap ‘cuz while he mentioned he was sending over some Saturnalian nuts for the holidays he also tried to pull a fast one for not sending something a bit more edible by noting “The rest of the fruit the rakish Garden God has bestowed on frolicking girls.”
History doesn’t record how well received his gift was, but considering that up until then the traditional holiday gift was a few plump-assed slave boys, you can imagine how less-than-thrilled Juvenal was.

Undoubtedly that was also the origin of the tradition of re-gifting. And while the popularity of the latter makes perfect sense, the popularity of nuts at Christmas time should have ended long before the Romans conquered the rest of the world. And probably would have except there are a lot of cheap bastards in the world and getting away with passing off a handful of nuts as a Christmas gift with the excuse they are a tradition still warms the cockles of cheapskates’ and maiden aunts’ today. And they are still better than fruitcake.

So fast forward a few thousand years and what might have started off the tradition of the Christmas gag gift instead became a firmly entrenched holiday observance throughout the Old World, including in Bulgaria where the entire family gathers together on Xmas Eve to play with theirs. While in other parts of Eastern Europe nuts are thrown into corners of the house for good luck (or simply because someone had the bad luck of being given some nuts as a Christmas present) walnuts are a necessary component of the Bulgarian Christmas meal. Each member of the family cracks one in order to determine their fate for the next year. If the walnut is a good one, it is said that the year will be successful. Bad luck is predicted for the person who cracks a bad walnut. Ho, ho, ho. Considering Bulgaria’s history, European nut growers must send all of their spoiled walnuts to its borders.

But that’s about walnuts, and thanks to a Jewish songwriter nothing says Xmas in the nut world like chestnuts. There does not seem to be a consensus on when and where people began the tradition of roasting chestnuts around the holidays, but early Christians believed the nut symbolized chastity. So I guess Cher was a bit of a fortune teller. In any case, the chestnut seems an odd choice of nuts to celebrate during the season of happiness and joy since one of their first appearance in history was when the Greek army managed to survive on their stores of chestnuts during their retreat from Asia Minor in 401-399 B.C. But then Christians have kinda made a religion out of losing. So there is that. Regardless, as nuts go, chestnuts suck big time. Even the Bulgarians ain’t interested in them.

Raw, chestnuts are quite bitter; they contain almost twice as much starch as potatoes, as well as high levels of tannic acid which can cause stomach irritation, liver damage, or kidney damage. Pregnant women should not eat raw chestnuts. Which may explain why they are given to the poor as a symbol of sustenance on the Feast of Saint Martin. ‘Cuz we certainly don’t need those folk breeding. And while chestnut trees can live up to five hundred years they usually do not begin to produce fruit until they are forty years old. Which doesn’t sound like something to celebrate to me. Obviously, chestnuts are not popular in Sunee Plaza.

Chestnuts have an earthy, musty taste, lacking the crunch usually associated with nuts. Unless they are roasted. Then, although the blah taste is the same, they quickly become so hard they can break a tooth if bitten too vigorously. Which is probably where the Christmas song All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth came from. Their popularity as a holiday snack, however, came from that little Xmas ditty written in Southern California on a hot day in July by a Jewish composer, which became the first holiday standard ever introduced by a black American. So it’s not the most popular holiday song on FOX News.

It is however a perfect example of the idiom, ‘pulling one’s chestnuts out of the fire’ ‘cuz said black American, Nat King Cole, ruined the holiday for pedantic folk when he recorded The Christmas Song in 1946 and sang the last line of the bridge: “To see if reindeers really know how to fly.” Tormé (said Jewish composer) says that Cole was a dogged perfectionist and stewed over this mistake, later re-recording the classic song at the end of another recording session, with the same-sized orchestra at hand. Those early first pressings have become collectors’ items and are more valuable than your entire Beanie Baby collection, which have become a chestnut (an old or stale joke) in their own right.