5 Case material derived from patients who were interviewed in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy and psychoanalysis revealed that their Christmas depressions were the result of unresolved sibling rivalries. In them the birth of Christ, a fantasied competitor against whom they were unable successfully to contest, reawakened memories of unsuccessful rivalry with siblings, real or fantasied, in their pasts. Oral conflicts were stimulated, and repressed cravings and frustrations were rearoused. They sought uniformly to obtain penes with which they imagined they could woo their mothers to give them the love which they felt had been previously unequally showered upon their siblings. There was some indication that they at times identified with Christ in an attempt to deny their own inferiority and to obtain the favoritism which would be His just due.