It’s important, every Christmas, to take a moment to think about how completely bonkers this method of conducting a census is.

Look at the state of it: every man travels, with his immediate family, to his ancestral home, to be registered. This. Is. Mad. It gives you almost no useful data on which to base public policy, while also creating infrastructure chaos.

If you were so bothered about recording male ancestry (why though?) you could have let people stay where they live and just put an extra question on the form. This stuff isn’t hard.

The unsafe birth of a baby in a stable as a result of a very sudden imbalance of city population to available beds is just one wholly avoidable and foreseeable consequence of this policy omnishambles.

I mean, of course there was no room at the bloody inn. Bethlehem’s hotel sector was designed to deal with a normal level of business travel and tourism, not to take part in an entirely arbitrary nationwide game of musical chairs.

What is the point of it? Yes, yes, tax, but in an age before electronic banking you’re either forcing people to carry risky amounts of cash - this policy is a bandit’s dream - or collecting it later, back home, in which case why bother?

And this happens, apparently, across *the entire Roman world*. It’s genuinely astounding the empire didn’t just collapse at this moment. Did they have exemptions for the military?

This is worse than Brexit - a point I make in a forlorn attempt to pre-empt people replying to me to tell me it’s worse than Brexit.

Caesar Augustus should resign.

Oh and by the way, the already pretty rubbish Bethlehem data would have been made even more useless (for things like planning primary school provision) by the massacre of the innocents just a short time later.

Literally getting “lol didn’t happen” people now https://twitter.com/endofmeoldcigar/status/1077164470814818304?s=21

Well.

And don’t get me started on how a group of wise men can see a star *in the east*, follow it, and end up being thought of, when they arrive at their destination, as having come *from the east* rather than - as going east and arriving somewhere would usually imply - from the west.