I looove Christmas! I am an atheist, but it’s still so much fun, and everyone is happy with presents and good food and good cheer. I consider it like a magic fairy tale time with all the decorations and lights.
The only thing I don’t do is talk about the Jesus story. I don’t have religious themed decorations. I have a nativity set I haven’t pulled out in years. I definitely don’t do church but my SO does because he’s Catholic. He wants to take my daughter this year but I’m not really comfortable with that, but I will probably let her go if she wants to.
Does it count if, despite being raised in the religious house, I never believed in the stuff myself?
I personally consider Christmas to be a completely secular holiday, while recognizing that it was originally a pagan holiday that the Christians stole for a while before surrendering it to the jolly old elf (backed by a million interested businessmen). So to me, the Christain elements seem tacked on, and are for the most part easily stripped back off again. Seriously, what’s christmas? Gifts, food, family, and celebration. What are the trappings that matter? Santa, snow, and decorated evergreen trees. About the only place where there’s any difficulty in excorcising the dark mythos is in the music - which is annoying, but there are enough songs that replace Jesus with Santa to fill a soundtrack if you try.
My family is Christian, so I can’t rebel too much (I feel no need to make holidays more stressful than they are). My mom sometimes (playfully) harasses me about celebrating ‘Christian’ holidays, but I don’t feel like pointing out that most of it is pagan (she means well and she isn’t hateful about it).
I was planning on sending out New Years’ cards, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it.
But I buy gifts, listen to music, everything else. Christmas is more about family than Jesus for me. I’ve been calling them Solstice gifts, mostly because I’ll be the only one who gets it if I call them Rammastide gifts (Rammastide is the Christmas substitute in Thundercats comics. Kinda like ‘Life Day’ is for Star Wars fans, except less changed from it’s inspiration.)
I moved into Paganism/Witchcraft in a gradual multi-year process during college and the years immediately following. For a while, there was pretty heavy baggage surrounding all things Christian (well, there still is to a certain extent); but over time I came to realize that most of what the majority of people do to celebrate Christmas is just a thin veneer of the Christian birth-of-Jesus story overlaid over the traditional symbols and mythology of pagan religions. The tree, the lights, celebrating the arrival/return of the light of the world (the Sun, or the Son)… so I can feel like a lot of what’s going on is “mine” too. The rank consumerism of the gift exchange still rankles, though.
Whether or not I decorate depends on whether I have time and/or space to do so. I have a tiny fiber-optic tree that I have sitting in the windowsill – that’s really all I have room for in my tiny apartment. I also have a painted-tin snowflake decoration hanging on the outside of my front door.
For the holiday itself – I generally make sure I get to a Yule/Solstice ritual in my own community. Christmas is spent with family, and the agony there has more to do with family drama than Christmas itself. And over recent years those of us who are willing to act like adults are talking openly and figuring out ways to manage those who don’t. I’m not expected to join them for Mass anymore. My family keeps up the Santa stuff for my younger nieces and nephews, and I don’t associate Santa in particular with a spiritual practice so it doesn’t really affect me one way or the other.
At this point, the winter holiday period is mostly about getting myself through Solstice so I can feel a little bit better about the fact that from here on out we’ll be getting a little bit more daylight every day. The lack of light pretty much makes me want to sleep all the time, so winter is pretty agonizing for me. Getting to a point where “it only gets better from here” is fantastic in my book.
My one big wish for this time of year is that there were more Yule carols/music out there. I like Christmas carols, I think the music is beautiful, but often the heavily Jesus-oriented lyrics end up making me feel a bit “left out.” I really wish that Yule carols were as ubiquitous as the Christian ones. Christmas carols are everywhere this time of year, but no one is singing/playing Yule carols.
Christmas is pretty secular anyway, so for me there wasn’t much of a difference when I became atheist or whatever I am. Even when I was christian, I (like most intelligent people) knew that Jesus wasn’t born on or anywhere near Dec 25th, that it was just a hijacked pagan holiday, so I always kind of took it with a grain of salt.
Without the trappings of Jesus and mangers, there’s still the giving and togetherness and all that jazz. Christmas trees and lights and presents and such have nothing to do with religion, so they don’t bother me and I’d do them anyway if my family wasn’t doing it all already.
I grew up Catholic. These days I treat Christmas pretty much like Thanksgiving with presents.
Mom still manages to make me feel bad for not going to midnight mass with her, but I won’t go just for her and she needs to deal with it.
I don’t decorate, but that’s more because I’m lazy and I have 4 cats and don’t want to either clean up the mess they will surely make of the tree, or risk foreign-body surgery to get an ornament or something out of a digestive tract!
I enjoy making the trip out to visit family, catch up with people I only see once or twice a year, exchange gifts, bake, and eat foods I don’t normally eat. For that, Christmas is still fun.
I have a friend who was raised Catholic but never had faith; his wife is also an atheist. The wife is a teacher in a school owned by a religious order, of which he’s an alumnus: it’s the second-oldest school in town, the oldest one to work continuously (it even worked when the Second Republic forbade priests and nuns from teaching, by hiring alumni as teachers), the main reason there aren’t fisticuffs over admissions is that the parents are too civillized for that. Although it’s nuns-owned, it’s barely more religious than the public school across the street. For example, each class group above 4th grade has a weekly Mass but it can be opted out (those who don’t go to it get a study period instead, age-adapted); in-school holidays that used to have religious names have been “secularized” (the one we used to call “the Baby Mary,” full name “Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady at the Temple”, is now called by its date); in-school holidays don’t include Masses any more. They intended to bring any of their children to that school.
They didn’t do any Christmas stuff at all until 2 years ago their eldest (3 at the time, not in school yet) remarked that it was kind of sad that other people got to sing and have fancy meals and stuff and they didn’t. That year they had a small presents exchange on January 6th (the traditional gift-giving day in our area); last year they added things like go to the Christmas Carols singalong on Main Square, visit public-display Nativities and watch the January 5th parade.
I lost what little faith I had when I was a teenager, but I’ve never stopped the Christmassy things. It’s a lovely celebration regardless, and isn’t really that Christian if you look at it objectively. I even went to a Midnight Mass carol concert a few years ago, just for the atmosphere.
I was raised baptist and methodist at different times. I am now a pantheistic pagan.
Christmas is a celebration of giving and capitalistic marketing.
The icon of Christmas is Santa Claus, not some waif in a barn.
I celebrate the season of shopping, spending and giving. I celebrate the opulence of the season and decorate accordingly.
But I raise my kids as Catholic so I let my wife pretend its about that waif for my kids (My wife is also pagan). We even have a nativity scene. (I figure my kids need a more organized religion to feel they belong to until they are out of college and beyone the grasp of the psuedo christian cults that recruit there, then I can enlighten them as to the truth of life the universe and everything.)
My mum was raised an Irish Catholic and my dad an English Protestant. I am not a Christian, I was never christened or baptized (interesting I had to spell check both those) and my parents were Socialists. I attended a Church of England primary school however so I have some idea about it all and was also … wait for it … a bell ringer. Big bells. The tree went up on Christmas eve and came down on twelfth night. On top of the tree was a fairy with a red fairy light up her skirt - my mum’s little obsession.
I’m getting less and less tolerant of religion and pointed out in the bank last year that all the decorations were celebrations of nature. Worried looks all round. I’ve got a little nativity set with the Jesus in the manger, but those gathering to adore the magi include giveaway creatures from KFC, a pair of dutch clogs, a variety of trees, a stuffed santa, in fact all are invited to attend. A couple of my daughters football trophies are muscling in for the occasion this year - golden figurines of girls dribbling. Yes! I love the whole fantasy thing. The kids made off with five out of my six brown angels and at one point I had to superglue the prince of peace into his manger.
What pisses me off is the goodwill to all men thing - what you can’t manage that the rest of the year? Also the gorging opulence thing. Jesus will always be the radical dude in the temple to me - greatly misunderstood.
I love the warmth and the lights and the red things and the shining joy on the faces of the children.
My Christmas joke (many a true word spoken in jest), and someone somewhere hasn’t heard it yet: Christmas is becoming so commercialized - they’ll be dragging religion into it next.
Me, too. Mama Plant kept giving me presents and asking us to holiday dinners. I’ve blacked most of that out of my memory.
I’ve hated all Holidays since my Father died when I was 16. It is great to not go Christmas shopping. A wonderful excuse not to go to staff parties. I love being able to ignore the whole thing.
I’m a double dipper. I have an early Solstice celebration with the roomie and friends (before the roomie flies back to BC) and then celebrate a secular-ish Christmas with my family.
I never really considered xmas a Christian holiday and never liked it anyway.
So, why should anything change?
I have a tree, candles. red and green lamps in my outside lights instead of soft white (or whatever they were), my kid’s xmas stocking on the fireplace.
Oddly, the pressure to do xmas came originally from my husband, also not a Christian, who felt xmas wasn’t a religious holiday but should be played up. Now he’s the one pulling back becuase he’s a messianic …whatever they are.
SWMBO still wants a tree and all that crap. If it were up to me, no way. My viewpoint has changed to one that says Christmas is the most annoying time of the year.
I converted to Judaism when I was 30. The rest of my family is Christian so I can get my fill when I celebrate with them. That first year, I really missed the songs, food, and decorations. Then, I realized that being Jewish doesn’t mean I am forbidden from listening to Christmas carols. Now, my family gives me Hanukkah gifts and I have 2 menorahs (one old fashioned and one electric) and a bunch of dreidels. I do get annoyed with searching through aisle upon aisle of Xmas crap for the one Hannukah display.
