Free The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas by Robin Harvie

the day after the holiday. The one exception that stands out was spent studying for my Ph.D. qualifying exams. I was home with my parents, but I hardly saw them; I was up every night until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. studying and doing endless exercises in calculus, physics, and astronomy. That particular holiday is now blurry in my memory, difficult to distinguish from fiercely complicated equations, dozens of pages of algebraic computations and notes, and endlessly having to sharpen my pencils.
    But this too did pass. As did I, as far as my exams went. But it wouldn’t be the last time I would associate Christmas and astronomy.
    To me, when I was younger, winter months always meant crisp, clean air, the sharp pinpoints of stars in the sky undimmed by the East Coast’s summer haze. In December especially, while my friends were dreaming of gifts and fun, my thoughts would turn to the brilliant colors of the stars in Orion as the constellation stood solidly over my southern horizon. I read everything I could about astronomy, and also practiced what I read: I would haul my 175-pound telescope to the end of the driveway and, shivering in the subfreezing temperatures, patiently aim it at various objects in the sky. Jupiter, Venus, the Orion Nebula . . . these all became my friends as I spotted and studied them.
    It was around that time of my life when it dawned on me that people generally misunderstood astronomy. I myself was a victim of this; when I was of a certain age I believed in all manners of nonsense, including UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and astral projection. (Well, I didn’t actually believe in that last one. Even then I was a budding skeptic and decided to do some experimental testing: I tried to project my mind using a book I found at the library. But, sadly, the girl I had a crush on showed no signs the next day that I had spent an hour trying to communicate with her from a higher plane.)
    The more I read about astronomy, the more instances I found of people misapplying it. Horoscopes were hugely popular, of course, as was the idea of aliens having visited humans, teaching us how to draw really long straight lines in the desert and paint confusing imagery on our stone walls.
    And, of course, every year in December, the newspapers would have articles about the Christmas star. You know the story: a star appears in the sky to guide the three wise men to the birthplace of Jesus. From the King James Version:
    Now, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,
    Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.
    A lot of folks in America like to interpret the Bible literally, so this passage is clear enough: an actual new star appeared in the sky that guided the wise men to Jesus. Ignoring for a moment that if they lived to the east and followed the star to the east, they’d get further from Bethlehem rather than closer, and that while Matthew makes a big deal of the star, Luke doesn’t even mention it—which already makes a literal interpretation of the Bible somewhat dicey—what we have here is an obvious astronomical tie-in with Christmas.
    It’s a star, after all.
    And that means that astronomy is once again intertwined with Christmas. Even as a lad I could see the implications of this story, and certainly every Christmas special on TV has some variation of a brilliant star in the sky as a symbol for Christmas. Really, my getting involved once again with Christmas was unavoidable.
    So I thought this legend over. Was the star real? A lot of people thought so. That meant I had to look at the evidence.
    It’s thought that the wise men were astrologers, so they would’ve had some familiarity with the sky; back then astronomy and astrology were pretty much the same thing, even if today they are as different as real medicine and homeopathy, or stage magicians and psychics, or