I’m sorry I annoy you by telling the truth. I put up the tree and the other decorations because I like shiny things, and I attend holiday parties and bake cookies so I can spend time with people I care about, and I love picking out presents and hoping the people I give them to like them, and yes, I like getting presents on Christmas morning. But as long as they are not gigantic old lady underpants with skid marks in them (an actual gift I got when I was about eleven), I will not complain about how stupid they are the next day.
Hey, I don’t have a problem admitting it. I love gifts. I celebrate “Give Pepper Presents” day. I buy other people gifts because it’s rude to show up empty-handed. Other than accepting gifts and watching Scrooged, I don’t really celebrate at all. Won’t even be putting up the fake tree this year because my cats eat it and they’ve already destroyed all our Christmas ornaments anyway.
As for Easter, I make it a point to watch The Ten Commandments. It has nothing to do with Easter itself, but it’s a tradition.
Dude, your mom cooks up a lamb on the holiday where they celebrate the death and resurrection of the Lamb of God? Wow, that’s sick. In a cool way. 
Cats and Xmas trees CAN co-exist, but the humans have to use only non-breakable ornaments on the tree, and no tinsel. I would not advise setting up a tree in a household with a kitten and/or a really rambunctious cat, though.
Easter rabbits and chicks and eggs go back to the old Pagan origins of Easter, when it was a fertility festival.
Oh yes…I’m an atheist, and I’ve celebrated some sort of winter holiday every year. My parents and sister are Catholic, and so I do the gift exchange with them and my brother, who is, I believe, an agnostic or atheist. When my daughter was younger, she always got a basket from the Easter Bunny, and had an egg hunt on Easter Morning. She quite enjoyed it.
I don’t eat most Easter candy, as I find that it’s really quite nasty. If I’m going to raise my blood sugar, I want to have as much pleasure as I can!
Thanks, Lynn!
Athiest/agnostic here. (btw, apatheist?: I like that fishbicycle! I’ll have to use that from now on. 
) I love Christmas! I love this whole time of year. I enjoy seeing all the lights and fancy decorations people put up. I like shopping for other people, picking out what I think would be the perfect gift. I have a great time getting up early with my family to open my presents and see their reactions when they see what I got them. I have no shame in admitting that. It’s fun! Plus in previous years, Christmas meant “the time when I get a month off from school.” Now that I have graduated, it’s only 4 days, but I still love the season.
I basically celebrate all the major holidays; Christian, Jewish, secular, whatever. They are just nice times to get together with family and have a good meal.
Agnostic-ish person here. I celebrate Xmas just as God intended, as a secular showering of material objects and a communal gathering. Anyone who says non-Christians shouldn’t celebrate Xmas doesn’t know what they’re talking about–it’s a secular holiday now; I don’t quite think it’s on the same level as Yom Kippur or something. If Christians want to take back Xmas then they should stop celebrating the secular parts of the holiday–I think most kids no matter what their religion would be more dismayed at the loss of Santa than the loss of baby Jesus. (Not that that’s right or okay or anything.)
I also celebrate Easter, and grew up doing so even though my parents aren’t religious (I’ve never even been baptized). Basically Easter is just an excuse to have a nice family dinner and eat a lot of candy. I also used to get a little present for Easter, like a CD or a paperback book, which other people find bizarre.
First let me say I came back and read my first post and came across sounding like an asshole. Sorry about that.
This is one of the problems I have with that holiday. It seems less about REALLY giving and more like you have to give because someone is giving you a gift.
Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m all about giving things to people. But I do it though out the year. My wife makes a little comment about wanting some gizmo she saw in the paper - I’ll track it down and give it to her one day she’s feeling down. Same with my daughter.
I don’t want to HAVE to give gifts to people in late december, I want to give gifts to make people happy. The adverts on TV and Radio “give her the gift that says I love you”. GRRR. I want to grab that announcer by the face and say “but it says ‘I love you’ more if she’s not expecting it. It says ‘I love you’ more when someone isn’t telling me how much it will say I love you”
Then you always hear the grumblings of “she/he’s so hard to shop for”. Those are the words of someone forcing themself to buy someone a gift. Not because they want to but because they feel they have to.
My mother way just in town and I gave her some really nice sheets and a nice down blanket. She mentioned something in a conversation not long ago about not liking her current blankets and sheets. I know my mother. She’d never spring for anything fancy when it comes to sheets. So I thought I’d treat her. I wrapped them and gave them to her. “What’s this for?”
“It’s just something I thought you’d like mom”
The gift went over great in two ways. She wasn’t expecting it and she knew I wanted to give her something that would make her happy. Why reserve this for only one day/week of the year?
This is the other thing that bugs me. What makes this time of the year so different from the rest of the year?
Can’t you bake cookies and hang out with loved ones in June?
(not directed at either of you)
Christmas seems to be the excuse to dig into those pockets and give to the needy. Help the hungry homeless dude out at Christmas. Get together with loved ones, have dinner and a nice conversation. Give someone you know a nice gift. Make the house look fancy.
Why can’t people do this shit year round? Why do people ignore the homeless and hungry in May but in December they feel they have to give to the food banks? Oh yeah, because no one should be hungry at Christmas time. Summer,. yeah, that’s ok.
Those bell ringers in front of stores bug me and toy drives for poor kids bug me. Not because I dislike the cause but because people make Christmas out to be this thing no one should miss. But the kids are still poor in July and people don’t give as much to the Salvation Army in March.
I guess its hard to explain. I always hear people say how much they love Christmas because it makes them happy - perhaps due to how everyone is in this “giving” mood, family, friends. Why can’t it be like that all the time?
Hey do you atheist people ever listen to any religous christmas songs such as silent night and other popular songs of the Christmas season? Just wondering because they are so popular it seems almost unavoidable, it seems like even a hardcore atheist would become for lack of a better word, attached to the religous songs as part of the holiday.
I know what you mean, Seven. I can even get behind making everyday “Give Pepper Presents” day! (ha, I KID! I know that’s not your point.) FWIW, I agree with your point. I think you are absolutely right that people should be giving, kind, considerate, happy folks year around, and I can absolutely understand why it frustrates you to know that’s not the case. I think it’s sad that you have to mostly accept that people are only moved to care about their fellowman one month of the year…
I would guess that most do, if by ‘celebrate Christmas’ you mean get together with family as opposed to going to church. My family is Jewish, so it’s a non-issue for me. 
But one of the first things my roommate asked me when we moved into this apartment was whether I was okay with getting and decorating a tree, and I was cool with that. If we have a get-together with friends like we did before Thanksgiving I’ll be thrilled.
Well, my family (and my extended family, back to my grandparents’ generation, on both sides, for that matter) is pretty nonreligious, and I myself am an atheist. But we’ve always celebrated Christmas—secular Christmas, at least. With the holy trinity of Santa, Rudolph, and the Elves, and the annual sacrifice of Turkey. Just an excuse to give and receive gifts, have a big family dinner, and basically “make merry.”
Christmas songs and carols with religious content were nice enough, but pretty much meaningless. “Oh Holy Night” might just as well been about the birth of Herakles, for all it meant to me.
We celebrated Easter, too, for that matter. But just the commercialized and bastardized-pagan remnants of it. No family dinner, but there was an egg hunt and chocolate.
Materialistic? Yeah, probably. But so what? It’s fun. Just like Halloween, or birthdays, or new years eve.
We’re atheists. Being a bilingual/bicultural family, we celebrate Christmas/jul. If you ever wonder why celebrations at/around the Winter Solstice were so common in so many cultures, I invite you to live at 60 degrees North for a while. You’ll grok. To the very bottom of your soul you will grok.
I grew up Roman Catholic in a practicing family; my husband, like most Norwegians, grew up in a semi-practicing Lutheran family. So to both of us, some of the Christian elements of Christmas are part of our heritage. We don’t have a creche with the Baby Jesus and the Magi and all that, but we make sure the kids know that’s what Christians are celebrating, and we play and sing carols with a Christian theme as well as secular ones.
Yes, I wish I could call down a pox on the heads of the advertisers who misuse Christmas to get people to go into debt for the sake of useless baubles. Yes, I think it would be better if more people thought of charity and the needs of others in all twelve months of the year and not just December. But no, I’m not going to let that stop me from giving my kids the joy of jul or the valuable gift of their full heritage.
Silent Night and The Little Drummer Boy are my two most favorite Christmas songs and I am very much an atheist.
Secular Christmas music sucks for the most part.
I’m an atheist who does the whole Christmas shebang. I even voluntarily went to a midnight Christmas mass a couple of years ago, for the nostalgia and atmosphere and the carol singing. We have a tree and a wreath on our door, we take more than a week off work, we exchange gifts and have a traditional Christmas meal, and contact our families. It’s a lovely celebration, even though I don’t believe what’s behind it.
At Easter we have eggs and a day off work, but that’s it. And it’s illegal to buy alcohol in Ireland on Good Friday, so everyone stocks up on booze on the Thursday before and drinks even more that day than they would have if alcohol weren’t banned! 
I grew up in an “off the beaten path” Christian household that didn’t keep Christmas or Easter, but observed Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles (go figure). The family left that singular sect when I was thirteen and began celebrating Christmas as a family, rather than a religious, holiday. I have observed Christmas and Thanksgiving ever since, even though I do not believe in the divinity (nor, perhaps even the existence) of Christ, nor the existence of a god. Both are family observances as far as I am concerned. As the family has become more geographically separated, it is always nice to have some specific times (and a great excuse) for gathering together. I wouldn’t give up those times for anything.
I’m atheist and I don’t celebrate christmas, or anything else for that matter (not even my birthday).
I think it has more to do with me highly disliking familial gatherings and all those occasions where you are “obliged” at a set time in a set day to meet some people, to stay at the table bored out of your skull until a “fixed” time etc
I also don’t like christmas decorations and the feeling that you are required to buy gifts for people.
But I also don’t like the religious connotations too.
And happily I have found a like-minded boyfriend! So last year I was able for the first time in my life to 100% avoid all that I dislike in christmas.
With any luck this year will be similar.
I am, and I do. It’s mostly the decorative appeal these days. I’ll be putting up some things around the house later today: strings of lights on the stairwell bannisters, getting out the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer toys to put around on the living room furniture, and maybe setting up a little tree (although I might leave that for another week or two).
Since I have nieces and nephews, there’s also been the appeal of buying presents for children the last few years. Although it doesn’t happen every year, I like to be there when they open their gifts, especially when I can see that they’re really happy with something they’ve gotten.
This year, my parents are coming to stay the week before Xmas, and are bringing my sister’s kids. They will leaving again on Xmas Eve, so the kids will be back with their own parents for the holiday, but we’ll be doing a lot Xmassy-type things, including opening presents, while they’re here. For me, it’s not very important to be Xmassy on the day itself; I’ll be home alone on the 25th this year, but have avoided telling friends and co-workers that in fear that someone will take pity on me and want me to come and spend the day with them. After a week of having family in the house, I’d rather have a day of quiet.
Christmas? Good
Tree? Good
Presents? Very Good
Family n friends? Good
Food I may not have had to cook? Good
Nativity? What the heck’s that?