Malcolm Gladwell Explains It All

Malcolm Gladwell elucidates the secrets of Christmas:

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

Imagine that I were to ask you to dress up as a baby and lie in a manger. Would you attract a comparable crowd of shepherds plus livestock and anything upwards of three kings from the East?

In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger.

Logic would dictate that at least one of them would be visited by shepherds, wise men, or kings from the East, right?

Wrong. The results--codified and analyzed on a specially devised and integrated grid system known as blsht--were astonishing. All 323 volunteers experienced a quiet night in. In other words, they waited up all night, but no one--specifically, 0.0000 percent of a total world population of 6,783,940,189 human beings--bothered to come by.

So what does this blsht metric tell you about your appeal, compared with the appeal of the baby Jesus?

It tells you this: he was special.

And--here's another thing--you are not.

More at the link, including why Santa Claus is so beloved.