Suffer the Little Children to Drown Unto Me

Now that fans of Baby Jesus have had their fun celebrating the mewling, puking incarnation of the Almighty, perhaps we might spare a thought for one of Daddy's other little pranks, which occurred ten years ago today. The Boxing Day tsunami, which killed more than two hundred and thirty thousand people and displaced a million and a half more, was not noticeably a direct result of human error. It seems to have taken place because of a massive earthquake on the floor of the Indian Ocean, so any connection with the usual divinely-punishable forms of human sinfulness, viz. sexual freedom and refusal to recognise Baby Jesus' cultural cleansing of the Saturnalia, would appear to be tenuous at best. Knowing everything, of course, Baby Jesus' Daddy must have known from the beginning of time that the earthquake and tsunami would happen; the All-Merciful must have known about the million and a half spontaneous additions to the housing market and the two hundred and thirty thousand dead, one-third of whom were children. He must even have known about the film The Impossible, in which a family of Aryans comes through the devastation more or less intact; perhaps that above all was what persuaded him that the whole thing would be for the best.