I consider myself Agnostic, and I don’t celebrate Easter in any way. When I explain this to my friends, they often wonder why I celebrate Christmas, then. I mostly celebrate it for my kids, and I emphasize the spirit of giving and love rather than the birth of Jesus. I don’t send out cards that say anything religious and I certainly don’t go to church services.
Do you other Agnostic/Atheists celebrate the holiday?
Christmas is a secular holiday and always has been. That “birth of the lord” nonsense was just tacked on later. Conversely, Easter, as far as I know, has always been religious but has been taken hostage by the Easter Bunny in recent decades. The two really aren’t all that similar.
To answer your question though, I’m an atheist and celebrate Christmas. I also like Easter because decorating the eggs is fun.
Jesus has never been a part of either holiday to me.
Sure I celebrate it… but as a holiday where I spend some time with the people I love, not as a religious event.
Like you, I’m an Agnostic and I celebrate Christmas, but not Easter. No kids, so I celebrate it for me:). Christmas was always about fun times with family, decorations, songs and gifts. With Easter, it was just candy and church. Easter wasn’t as fun, so I stopped celebrating when I left religion.
I love Christmas and I am a godless heathen!
For me, Christmas is about celebrating with your friends and family. I buy everyone I can gifts, I donate to charities, I try to get together with as many friends and family members as I possibly can - even the ones I don’t like too much.
I love the smell of Christmas in Ohio. Christmas in Southern California doesn’t feel like ‘real’ Christmas to me. ‘Real’ Christmas involves snow, pine trees, fires in the fireplace, bells jingling in the air and so much more than I can’t explain in concrete terms.
I don’t really celebrate easter other than eating the chocolate bunnies. XD
A lot of people are the same way, the birth of Jesus is rarely mentioned in many families over the holidays.
As well as being a non believer, I also don’t like seeing needless overconsumption and waste. I tell my family not to bother since I can’t think of anything I need.
For the kids it’s okay, but even then I don’t like to see massive volumes of toys given to one child, it wasn’t like this fifty years ago.
But I do like getting together with friends, we need a year end holiday and the winter solstice seems like a good enough reason.
I do. It’s a seasonal thing for me, and I just go with the flow of the rest of the family. They haven’t been able to drag me to church for it for 25 years though.
I don’t even touch Easter (unless Mom’s making lamb. I can be a hypocrite for lamb.) Celebrating that would be as foreign as celebrating any other religion’s holiday, except that I do know what’s supposed to be going on. I would be as out of place at a bat mitzvah though.
My husband and I (agnostic and atheist, respectively) don’t celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the Winter Solstice.
So we get to open our presents a few days early. 
When we’re back home with family, I go to Christmas Eve services with them ‘cause it’s a nice family thing to do . . . I say hi to my old Sunday School teachers, enjoy the stained glass and candles, listen to the Nativity story, and hear my cousin’s kids sing Stille Nacht in the choir. I stand and sit when the congregation does in order to avoid makin’ a big thing, but don’t say the responses or prayers or amens. My family (thank goodness) doesn’t give me grief about not participating anymore . . . not after the Communion Incident.
I also watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original Boris Karloff verision, natch!) and A Charlie Brown Christmas every time they’re on and listen to the soundtracks constantly, which drives my husband nuts.
I’m an atheist and I celebrate Christmas, along with the rest of family. It’s a good excuse to put up pretty lights, to get together with my family, have a meal and to swap gifts. Although it’s going to be a bit quiet this year. There’s only going to 4 of us on Christmas day, and there’s usually 10. 
I also celebrate Easter (well, I eat chocolate eggs anyway. )
I definitely celebrate Christmas, and I’m an atheist. It’s a family celebration for me, and I essentially never think of it as a religious event.
Good point – the Gospels give no specifics for a birth date, and there are no records that the early Christians even cared about it. A “feast day” for the birth of Christ was kinda shoehorned into the calendar of extant festivities for cultural reasons. But even then – for many of the peoples that adopted the religion in the intervening centuries, Xmas remained something of a secondary holiday, and the popular celebration has remained most often a Winter Festival. Consider for instance how virtually every popular media version of “the true spirit of Christmas” out there will say zippo about Jesus Christ, and center itself on generosity and love and “magic”.
OTOH the Feast of the Resurrection was the main religious commemoration of Christianity almost from the start, and it had to happen on a date close to the Passover because the Gospels themselves say so (in other languages they still even retain the same name: e.g. in Spanish it’s “Pascua” for BOTH the Christian AND Jewish holiday set in March/April). That many Northern-hemisphere cultures had a vernal-equinox related festivity whose trappings could be adapted to make conversion palatable, was a bonus.
Now I have a much better answer to the question “Why do you celebrate Christmas if you don’t celebrate Easter” than “um, uh… because I like it!”
I’m an atheist and I celebrate and enjoy Christmas. Being with the family and giving presents and stuff is great. And I don’t mind celebrating Jesus. He was a nice guy, except for all the delusions of grandeur. I really like Jesus. I just can’t stand a lot of his followers.
I didn’t before I got married, but that was partially from growing up Jewish. Now we do, but besides my MIL going to church, it is entirely secular. No angels, no mangers, no Christ children.
When the kids were little my wife and MIL would take them to church, but that was just to get them out of the house to move presents. Now they’re old, and atheist too, :), they don’t go either.
BTW, one of the best things about our arrangement was that because my family didn’t celebrate it, we had no conflicts about where we would up for Christmas day.
I’m atheist my wife is a christian. Before I was married easter and christmas were just regular days for me.
It is a rare moment I even get the day of the holiday right.
Personally I see christmas as a holiday of greed. People are always complaining about what they received “man, so and so gave me such a stupid present”. Of course people try to cover it up with all the “it’s about giving and not receiving” bullshit. But really I just see people trying to out do each other on gift giving. Like it’s the contest of the year.
The marketing, shopping, and everything that surrounds christmas in the USA would make Jesus return with an AK47 and start shooting.
It also bugs me that people who don’t beleive in Jesus always come up with some lame ass excuse to partake in Christmas. “I don’t celebrate the birth of christ, I celebrate santa” or “It has nothing to do with Christmas, it’s about the coming of winter”. Bullcrap. It’s all about getting gifts.
Don’t even get me started on people putting dead trees in their house
Yes, I am agnostic and I love to celebrate Christmas. I too like to emphasize the the aspects of love and giving. But I don’t have an issue with the Jesus aspect of it either. If he existed, his central message was one of love. I’m good with that.
I celebrate Christmas with strictly a Santa Clausy, love and giving, presents and a tree way. I don’t go to church or anything. For Easter we celebrate it with the Easter bunny, with candy and things like that
My wife and I are apatheists - we don’t care about religion one way or the other. We celebrate Christmas as the time when we get each other gifts, and give some to her family, and get some back. We don’t have a tree, because I can’t see how we could avoid having our cats wreck it, and eat the tinsel, etc.
I don’t even know when Easter is. But when it comes up, I get to eat chocolate bunnies - and chickens. Chickens?! What’s up with Easter Chickens, anyway?
Christmas-celebrating atheist here. Also, I don’t wait until a certain time of year to give gifts. I’ll do it on Christmas, birthdays if I’m around, and any other time I feel like it. A few months back, I got my mom one of these (Moe the Parrot), because she’s a huge Jimmy Buffett fan and I thought it was just perfect.
Atheist who LOVES Christmas, here. I don’t celebrate any of the other Christian holidays (although I do buy chocolate bunnies at Easter just because they are yummy), and I completely ignore the Baby Jesus part of Christmas, but I still celebrate. Tree, gaudy decorations, carols, cookies, presents for everybody… as far as I’m concerned, the entire month of December is a celebration of light and love - keeping out the cold of winter, and spending time with family and friends.