For fear of hijacking this thread perhaps a new one about atheists and Christmas.
I for one am Atheist. Pretty much always have been.
For me, I see zero point in having anything to do with Christmas (or Easter or any other Christian holiday). I can’t stand the music, I think the idea of bringing a tree into the house is a waste of time, money -and a tree.
People always give me a hard time because I’m anti-christmas. They say “why don’t you just enjoy Christmas for what it is and forget about the fact it’s a Christian holiday?”
Humbug I say. HUMBUG!
Without getting into old school pagan stuff, Christmas IS a Christian holiday. It has been over marketed to death, but it is still a Christian holiday at the end of the day.
I see very few Christians celebrating Hanukkah for what it is and forgetting it is a Jewish holiday. Nor do I see them celebrating Mawlid Al-Nabi, forget the fact it is a Muslim holiday… IT’S FUN!
One thing I REALLY hate about Christmas… people feel they need to give to the needy more. They donate food to poor families and presents to the children of poor families. They say “it’s all for the children. you wouldn’t want poor Billy to not get a good Cristmas dinner would you”. Hogwash. I would rather poor Billy get dontations from people who could afford it 365 days a year and NOT just on Christmas. It’s not like the poor families go away for the rest of the year.
I got into a big talk with a “athiest” friend of mine. She said she celebrated Santa on the day of Christmas. I called bullsh*t and said “you just want the presents. It has nothing to do with anything else.”
She got pretty mad at me.
So my question is… Are there other Athiests out there that feel the same way about Christmas I do?
I am also an athiest, and I don’t much like christmas, but not because of my lack of religiuos beliefs, I just think it is an excuse for the merchants of the world to prosper! However, we do celebrate it in our house, and I love the look of joy when the children open their presents!
Do I celebrate Christmas? Well that depends on what you mean. I obviously don’t go to mass or anything similar and don’t look at it at a time to celebrate the birth of Christ. I do however enjoy having a week and a half of work (sometimes a bit less depending on what day of the week Christmas falls). I enjoy the run up with work parties etc. and I love the actual day. All the kids so excited about Santa (not God). My family home is the center of activities as we have the last surviving Grandmother staying with us. The whole family comes over gets drunk and has the craic(fun).
The religious side of it rarely enters into it, as my whole family are a pack of heathens
Plenty of Christians have fun at Halloween, which was a pagan holiday as was Christmas actually. So I don’t see why Atheists can’t enjoy Christmas.
Oh and in Ireland, Good Friday is the biggest party day of the year as all the pubs close :eek: and thus the country goes drink crazy and has poker sessions and parties galore
I love Christmas. It’s my favourite time of year. I love decorating the house and sending out Christmas cards and catching up with my family for a great meal together. I love all the little Christmas traditions and Christmas Carols. It’s my favourite time of year. And to me, it has zero association with Christianity. I don’t see why other people get all hung up at the idea of atheists celebrating a Christian holiday - it’s a public holiday, and not one person in my family even mentions religion on the day. If this is how true Christians celebrate, then I would be disgusted, because for us this day is 100% about family and togetherness, not God or anything like that.
If it suddenly became illegal to celebrate Christmas unless you attended church, I hope and think that my family would set up their own celebration for another day that resembled our old Christmas celebrations - the tree, the presents, the food, the family. All of these great fun things have nothing to do with religion.
Read the book The Battle for Christmas by Nissenbaum. It’ll tell you how Christmas got that way. Excellent history, and very thought-provoking.
At bottom, I don’t think Christmas is ultimately Christian or Pagan, or anything else. It’s a time when people string up lights and get together because it’s damned dark and cold. Putting up lights might be siome sort of sympathetic magic aimed at persuading the sun to change its course and start getting up earlier in the morning, but putting up lights is more immediately a way of relieving the Dark. Everything else followed from that.
I love A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ original book, and several of the adaptations of it that urge the celebration of Christmas and decry economic exploitation. Which is why I find the sponsorship of these shows on commercial-laden TV darkly hilarious and ironic.
In short, I think Christmas a necessary holiday. It has become overlaid with religious messages of various stripes, and a very heavy commercial message (too many companies make an awful lot of their profits from the Christmas rush), but I don’t know what to do about that. Banning the holiday seems far too harsh a remedy. No point in killing the patient.
Hey, Christmas is a perfect excuse to have parties, socialize, and exchange gifts! What’s wrong with that?
(And if you want to get nasty about it, just remind the Christians that it’s originally a pagan holiday anyway. Ain’t no trees and mistletoe in the baby Jesus’ manger, kids… )
I’m an atheist, and I love Christmas. In my non-religious family, Christmas was always a big deal, and we never went to church, nor was the Christian aspect even mentioned. I guess I always knew what Christmas was about (thanks, Charlie Brown Christmas special) but to me, and now to me and my son, Christmas is about family and friends.
We also celebrate Easter secularly (a perfectly cromulent word) - it’s all about the Easter bunny.
I like holidays for the sake of holidays. Give us an excuse to give gifts and do neat stuff, and maybe take some time off from work.
The way I see it, societies and religions have been co-opting each others’ celebrations as long as there have been societies and religions.
It’s springtime: the snow’s finally melted and all these pretty flowers are blooming. Let’s all get crocked on last year’s fermented grain!
The crops are in, and it’s gonna get damn cold soon. Better party while it’s still nice outside. We’ll pig out and get nice and fat.
Holy Zoroaster, it’s cold! I know it sucks outside; why don’t we all meet over at Beezy’s cave for a rip-up?
These are fairly natural times to celebrate, and it seems most cultures do something or other to mark these 3 seasons. To me, the name–and even the traditions–aren’t so important. I just like an excuse to get with loved (or lusted, or even liked) ones and kick back.
Wasn’t able to think of a summertime celebration that ran from culture to culture. What’d I miss?
So Christmas, if I understand right, is just an excuse to hang out with the family and give them gifts?
So why not just ring the family up to come over on Nov 5th (or some other random date), make them a nice dinner and pass out gifts to them?
I would think your family and friends would find that a much more special time because you did it for no other reason then to give them something nice and spend time with them because you love them.
Hey! Don’t you want the sun to return from the south? That’s what Christmas is for, the birth of a new sun.
I would call myself and atheist exactly, but I do think that the probability is extremely low that there as a supernatural deity of the type most Christians, Jews and Muslims postulate.
Seven, it wasn’t clear to me if you were responding to my post or the general tone of the thread, but since your reply followed mine, I’ll assume the former.
At the risk of getting all anthropological, my point was just that we human critters seem to like an excuse to periodically cut loose once a season. The exact date isn’t magical, IMO. And if a person or family found itself surrounded by a culture/religion whose celebration it found distateful (which is how I interpret your OP), then why not choose another date to party? However, I do think it adds to the enjoyment if the whole society shares the same day, even if not the same rituals.
Plus, it makes federal holidays easier to come by!
Another atheist who celebrates Xmas. Why?
[ul]
[li]I enjoy exchanging gifts with friends and family.[/li][li]I like listening to Nat King Cole “The Christmas Song”[/li][li]I like watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and other things reminiscent of childhood.[/li][/ul]
In short, I enjoy it, so I do it.
My family Christmas involved sharing roughly three meals with 4 parents, 8 siblings, 2 or 3 grandparents, about 20 aunts/uncles and somewhere around 30 cousins and their children. This isn’t something you throw together on the spur of the moment. Having the 25th of December earmarked as the rough date on which we’ll all get together helps everyone know when to expect this feast to happen. My family has two celebrations (one on my father’s side, one on my mother’s side), and Mr Cazzle’s family tends to have one but sometimes his mother will do a family gathering just for her children. We don’t just hold these get togethers on Christmas Day, we sometimes hold them on days leading up to and following Christmas. This Christmas just gone, we held our wedding on December 22, Mr Cazzle’s family gathering on December 23, my father’s family celebrated on December 24 and my mother’s family on December 25. We had a really small wedding reception because we used Christmas as a kind of extended reception.
Sure, it’s a huge thing, but it’s so great to see everyone. We all have trouble keeping up with each other the rest of the time - everyone is always so busy - but at Christmas, we get to see all the family and talk and enjoy each other’s company.
And commercialism is something people always complain about. Christmas is as commercial as you allow it to be. My mother’s family have realised that the massive exchange of gifts is exhausting to aquire, expensive and pointless, so they’ve adopted a Secret Santa arrangement, where you draw a name out of a hat, and only buy a gift for that person. This works really well for us.
Very well said. The point that it is a time when all society can do it together is also good.
I would add that this is a predominately Christian culture. If it was predominately Jewish then it would be better to go along with the dates they use: predominately Islamic or Chinese the same. When in Rome do as the Romans do.
Because those random days aren’t going to be a nearly universal paid holiday. People do work and most do not have flexible employment. Plus it helps brighten up December where everyone, except Seven, is acting on their best behavior because they want to not because they have to.
All I’m looking for is viewpoints from other atheists on how they deal with a Christian holiday.
As an atheist, with christmas, these are the “attacks” (I use the term loosely) I normally get. I do not wish to celebrate a christian holiday, simple as that. But so many people find this hard to understand. They try to make the entire holiday out to be non-christian -much like this thread.
And I’m not saying I sit at home in the dark. I follow my wife to her parents house and we do the whole dinner thing.
The only thing I do around Christmas time that pisses people off is when I’m in a store or out someplace and people say “merry Christmas” I simply say “Thanks, but I’m not Christian.”
But then again, I’m the guy who got kicked out of school for refusing to say “one nation under god” in the pledge because IMO it isn’t a nation under god. So I’m pretty used to getting a hard time for my personal belief of no god/s.
** Seven, you’re ususally pretty cogent, but I’m not sure I get you here. Are you saying the thread participants are making Christmas out to be a non-christian holiday? If so, I must have missed the whole point of your OP. If the holiday ain’t christian, what’s your beef?
Just in case I missed something subtle, my point throughout the thread had been that it’s primarily a christian holiday in current-day North America, because current-day North America is primarily christian. In another place & time, we’d still be celebrating in late December, but with different rituals.
I’m not quite that aggressive about others’ beliefs, but it’s certainly your right. I’d like to think if the Venusians wished me a happy “Kifhlk Orngolak,” I’d wish one back at them. But then I’m not offended by others observing their own customs, or even trying to include me in them. YMMV.
** Well, I can agree with you here, inasmuch as you were more or less being forced to do something against your beliefs. That would suck, especially at grade school age. I’m sorry that happened to you, and it may have made you a little more sensitive to other people just trying to be inclusive.
Seven, I just re-read the first line of my reply, and realize it comes off sounding like an insult. The opposite was intended, as it was your ususal posting style I wanted to stress. Sorry.
