As I’m not Christian, my family does not celebrate Christmas. In spite of what some feel, Christmas is not a secular holiday. It is a Christian holiday, and I treat it as one.
I have off from work and it’s basically like a Sunday. I’m spending most of the day doing chores around the house. We will go ice staking this afternoon mostly as a way to kill some time.
When I was a kid I wanted to celebrate Christmas too. It seemed like a lot of fun. Starting in my late teens, I developed a real hatred for the holiday. It wasn’t my holiday and I felt I was being forced to observe it. This cause me to dread the end of December and get impatient and angry each December.
In my mid-30’s, as most people do, I started to mellow out. If the majority of the country wants to have a big holiday, please do. If my company wants to give me a day off, I’ll take it. There is enough unhappiness in the world. There’s nothing bad about something that makes many people happy for a few weeks, even if it doesn’t do anything for me.
For those of you who are celebrating, Merry Christmas!
Thank you! I was raised in a Christian faith, but am no longer religious. Once I learned the real reason for the December holiday (pssst… Solstice!) I began to like the holiday a whole lot more. Most of the “Christmas” symbols, other than the manger scenes, are based on paganism anyway. Days getting longer, we will not freeze in eternal darkness, the sun will return, 3 days straight, let’s celebrate! Call it whatever you want to.
I’m a Christian and I just had to come to peace with Christmas, too. While I loooove giving gifts I do get tired of how far away from the meaning of Christmas we’ve all gotten.
This year I got my family to agree to not give any gifts (to me, or expect them from me), give money to charity and spend as much time together as possible.
It’s been great and I can’t imagine doing it any other way now.
I’m an atheist, but see no reason not to celebrate Christmas, at least the less overtly religious aspects . . . especially since it’s so close to the winter solstice. In fact, this year I put up my very first Christmas tree, and have been playing holiday music. Today, being the day after, I’m going out to pick up some half-price ornaments.
I was born Catholic but gave up the faith right around the same time my critical thinking skills began to develop. I’ve always celebrated Christmas since then with an eye towards a national holiday rather than the religious conotations the day brings for Christians. Its good for the economy and good for people’s spirits even without the religious overtones…maybe even better without them.
I am not religious and wasn’t born to a religious family. I would characterize myself as atheist. I do celebrate Christmas though, and look forward to it with great relish each year. I am aware of its Christian roots, but I do not treat it as a religious holiday. I simply regard it as a time of year when those who observe the holiday celebrate friends and family and the goodness in us all with an exchange of gifts, cards, and a gathering of family and loved ones once a year. The rest of the time we’re all usually too wrapped up in our own lives and the trials and tribulations therein, so Christmas to me is a time when we can take a little bit of time off to heal rifts, renew ties, and show everyone in our lives that we still think of them and that they are still important to us.
If I had to maintain some sort of religious tie to it, I would say that, when you get right down to it, isn’t that the sort of message of love that Jesus wanted everyone to understand?
Yes, Christmas is a highly commercialized holiday – but really, the commercialization is the other half of the Christmas equation. Gifts are given, thus they must be purchased, hence the need for commercial outlets from which to do so.
cwPartner and I are not Christian, but my side of the extended family, with a few exceptions, identify as Christian. cwPartner and I don’t celebrate Christmas ourselves, but we get together with my relatives for the day each year. Whatever we believe individually, we all like to hang out, exchange small gifts, and overeat. cwPartner and I hand out homemade candy and cards telling people that we’ve made donations to relevant charities in everyone’s honor. Mindfield expressed it well:
This year my cousin and her husband brought their daughter, who is 2 going on 3. There’s a pure joy to be had from watching a small child opening gifts.
On a more personal level, doing Christmas with the family, even if it’s not my holiday, is salutary because it reminds me that most Christians aren’t hysterical War-on-the-War-On-Christmas combatants, raging homophobes, or marauding proselytizers. They’re my family, and that’s a fine thing.
I consider Christmas to be somewhat like Disney World. There’s a zillion people who embrace it uncritically and unconditionally. If you’re not a member of that group, it’s natural to be put off by the omnipresent artifice, commercialism, and unrelenting shallow enthusiasm. But if you can get past that, you might eventually learn to appreciate the concept on another level entirely. Everything is artificial; yet it is all totally bizarre and charmingly inexplicable in a completely natural and organic way that would have been impossible to achieve if they had actually started out with the intent of making something intentionally freaky.
So, too, is Christmas. As a holiday, it makes absolutely not a damn lick of sense from the outset. And this is a good thing. It really isn’t a Christian holiday anymore, and I like to think that’s exactly the way Jesus himself would have preferred it: not as a celebration of himself, but as a general celebration of generosity and family and remembrance and peace and love and hope and joy. It’s an indecipherable and baffling collision between Hebrew apocalyptic prophecy, pagan solstice rites, Victorian England, and talking cartoon reindeer; all presided over by a jolly 4th-century Turkish bishop, set to music, and underwritten by the Coca-Cola company.
You couldn’t set out to invent something like Christmas. It is owned by no one faith anymore. Santa Claus loves all children, everywhere. There’s nothing exclusive about mistletoe or tinsel or misfit toys. Linus may have felt the need to cite scripture in the holiday’s defense, but the true miracle was when the whole gang walked out into the cold to find their friend and comfort him, and the little tree became beautiful. That’s what Christmas is really all about, Charlie Brown.
If Christmas didn’t exist, there would inevitably be some other holiday at that time of year with much the same cheerfully mongrel secular dimension; because we live in a world where boundaries and divisions are rightly seen as hurtful, and we all need to look past those barriers to appreciate each other as people. Purely by accident, Christmas has expanded to fill that need; it has shed much of its religious trappings-- sacrificed itself, one might say-- to become the holiday of giving and reaching out to strangers against the winter cold.
With luck, it will continue to become even more strange and wondrous through the years.
