274 AD – Roman Emperor Aurelian dedicates a temple to Sol Invictus on the supposed day of the winter solstice and day of rebirth of the Sun. The early Roman Catholic Church appropriated this holiday and made it into what we celebrate as Christmas today. A more likely date for the birth of Jesus would be earlier, certainly no later than the fall.

336 – First documentary sign of Christmas celebration in Rome. There’s already a celebration. We just as well make it OURS. The same thing is tried in 1966 with Kwanzaa. It didn’t catch on like Christmas.

1066 – Coronation of William the Conqueror as king of England, at Westminster Abbey, London. He was also known as “William the Bastard”. Sort of like our own “Barack the Pussy.”

1223 – St. Francis of Assisi assembles the first Nativity scene. ACLU gets the vapors.

1741 – Astronomer Anders Celsius introduces Centigrade temperature scale based on two easily reproducible natural standards, the freezing and boiling points of water.

1776 – George Washington and his army cross the Delaware River to attack the Kingdom of Great Britain’s Hessian mercenaries in Trenton, New Jersey. The moment is captured in a famous, although inaccurate, painting. Americans – We’ll cross a frozen river in the middle of the night on Christmas and kill you. It’s happened.

1815 – The Handel and Haydn Society, second-oldest continuously performing arts organization in the United States, gives its first performance. The U.S. Marine Band (founded 1798) is the oldest. See 1896, below.

1818 – Handel’s Messiah makes its US premiere in Boston.

1896 – “Stars & Stripes Forever” written by John Philip Sousa.

1926 – Emperor Taisho of Japan dies. His son, Prince Hirohito succeeds him as Emperor Showa. Emperor Hirohito reigns until his death in 1989, seeing his country go from world power through WW II to an ashpile and then its resurrection as a world force again.

1941 – Admiral Chester W. Nimitz arrives at Pearl Harbor to assume command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Coincidentally, two Japanese carriers from the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor, the Akagi and Kaga arrive back in Japan. Six months later they’d be on the bottom of the Pacific near Midway Island.

1941 – Admiral Émile Muselier seizes the archipelago of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which become the first part of France to be liberated by the Free French Forces. Mighty gutsy there, Gaston! These islands are off the coast of CANADA! France’s greatest military victories in WW II are against other French.

1989 – Romanian Revolution: Deposed President of Romania Nicolae Ceau?escu and his wife, Elena, are condemned to death and executed after a summary trial, thereby becoming GOOD communists.

1990 – The first successful trial run of the system which would become the World Wide Web. Algore curiously absent.

1991 – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as President of the Soviet Union (the union itself is dissolved the next day). Ukraine’s referendum is finalized and Ukraine officially leaves the Soviet Union. The whole stinking mess just fell apart.