The True Meaning of Christmas
The True Meaning of Christmas
[Cueball is talking to a guy wearing a Santa hat.] Cueball: You’re looking festive. Santa Hat: I love Christmas! Cueball: Really? Doesn’t seem like your kind of thing. Santa Hat: It’s our most meta holiday!
[Same setting.] Cueball: How so? Santa Hat: All our Christmas stories now are about discovering the “true meaning of Christmas.”
[The same setting in a frame-less panel where Santa Hat shrugs.] Cueball: Huh, yeah. And then sharing it with others. Santa Hat: At some point, that quest itself became the true meaning.
[Same setting with Santa Hat holding a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Like a word whose definition is “the act of looking up the definition of this word.” Santa Hat: “Autometalogolex”? Cueball: My least favorite of Santa’s reindeer.

This is the first of two Christmas comics in a row. It is making fun of the common trope in popular media that the true meaning of Christmas is about family, friends, and sharing the Christmas Spirit. It subverts the trope by suggesting that once the stories of the "True Meaning of Christmas" become sufficiently common, the real true meaning becomes to spread those stories. Thus the search for the "True Meaning of Christmas" is itself the meaning of Christmas, in a sort of "the journey is the reward" discovery.
In the last panel and title text, "Autometalogolex" is a neologism of Randall's, which can be broken down to its various prefixes and the root:
"Auto-" - Greek meaning "self." "Meta-" - Greek meaning "after," "beyond," or "in reference to." "Logo-" - Greek meaning "word" or "speech." "Lex" - "lexis" is another Greek word meaning "word"; but in this case it is more likely to be a shortening of "lexicon" (another word for dictionary), or perhaps a reference to the process of "lexing" (lexical analysis), part of the process of computer analysis of text.
Thus, "Autometalogolex" would literally mean "A word that refers to itself in the dictionary," or more precisely "the act of looking up the definition of autometalogolex", which leads to a recursion, as all meaning of Christmas stories do. Recursion and self-reference is a recurring theme in xkcd.
The term Autometalogolex might also refer to autological words, words that refer to a property of the word itself. ("noun" is a noun, "pentasyllabic" is pentasyllabic [has 5 syllables]). "Autometalogolex" is a 'meta' version of the looking up (lex) of an autological word.
Cueball finally states that Autometalogolex is his least favorite of Santa Claus's reindeer . This is not among the commonly quoted list of names: Dasher , Dancer , Prancer , Vixen , Comet , Cupid , Donder , and Blitzen . [ citation needed ] As the title text reveals this ninth reindeer could be a reference to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , who was not accepted by the others until Santa had problems and asked it to lead the other reindeer pulling the sleigh. The title text may also imply the only effective outcome of Autometalogolex (or the newly defined Christmas) is giving headaches, as with many self-referential concepts. As headaches generally are bad, Autometalogolex is not accepted, but - as in a typical Christmas story, here driven into the absurd realm - Santa needed a headache, and Autometalogolex was there to save the day.
[Cueball is talking to a guy wearing a Santa hat.] Cueball: You’re looking festive. Santa Hat: I love Christmas! Cueball: Really? Doesn’t seem like your kind of thing. Santa Hat: It’s our most meta holiday!
[Same setting.] Cueball: How so? Santa Hat: All our Christmas stories now are about discovering the “true meaning of Christmas.”
[The same setting in a frame-less panel where Santa Hat shrugs.] Cueball: Huh, yeah. And then sharing it with others. Santa Hat: At some point, that quest itself became the true meaning.
[Same setting with Santa Hat holding a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Like a word whose definition is “the act of looking up the definition of this word.” Santa Hat: “Autometalogolex”? Cueball: My least favorite of Santa’s reindeer.
