Happy Wrestling Day to Canadian Students!

For all you undergrad students who are still learning how to engage the culture, let me tell you the history of Canada's Christmas Sequel, known as Wrestling Day.

There is a great dispute on the origins of Wrestling Day:

1. In fuedal times, peasants would give christmas gifts to their fuedal lords. If the lord was displeased with your gift you would have to wrestle to the death against another poor gift giver. If you won the wrestling match and lived to see another Christmas, then you'd better find a better gift for next year. Usually gifts of Pork, Jewelry, and Furniture were failsafe gifts and gifts of songs, books. and jest were sure to land you in the wrestling ring. The essential truth of this tradition is still true today as I would much prefer Bacon or a nap to the dixie chicks album and the filthy wordpages I got this year. SPU doesn't have a wrestling team anymore, but the gymnastics team seems to spend a lot of time their backs so we'll make you join the team.

2. Some theorists claim that the celebration and practice described above is not the true origins of the holiday celebrated today. That the origins of the holiday started when Canadians were really into boxing one year and everyone spontaneously gave each other betamax copies of "Wrestling's Ultimate Smack-Downs." The Prime Minister declared the day not only a National Holiday but also a Holy Day as he rushed to give Sainthood to Vince McMahon. Some of our Canadian Exchange students have encouraged the Chapel staff to honor this holiday traditions of theirs, but that is just ridiculous... I mean who has a betamax machine?

3. Marxists Historians ascribe to the theory that wrestling day is the day after christmas because the western protestant bolshevist capitalist machine grinds to a stop on christmas eve and remains at rest for one day. During that day the proletariat dared to stop and tend to their wounds incurred during their hard under appreciated manual labor. The day after Christmas, the capitalist pigs would return to their capitalist profit machine and need to oil it... oil it with the blood of the workers and hence needed to wrestle them and beat them into the ground before the start of the work day so that the capitalist machine could start up again. We see this celebrated today in the way that post christmas sales lure the workers into the stores and all those fools climb all over each other to get the 50% off deal on a plastic rock-n-roll santa that plays the guitar and sings "jingle bell rock" six times before turning off.

Of course for lame-os like Les Steele the holiday means wrestling free from the lame bio-flex home gym work out machine he wanted for christmas. I however celebrated by opening a box of mallomars and taking a nap, a gift I always remember to give to myself.

Now you know....

Peace on Earth
Good Will Towards Phil