I celebrate Christmas only in the sense that I enjoy holiday parties and giving and receiving presents. I don’t have a tree or voluntarily listen to carols or anything like that. Can’t be bothered.
Sure, I do Christmas and Easter. We do the trees, the stockings, the presents, the eggnog, the Easter egg hunts – all that jazz. It makes the kids happy. I just don’t go to Mass when my wife takes them later in the day.
Some would call me an Athiest, although really I don’t accept as truth anything that anybody says about God, including Athiests. Call me a fire-breathing Agnostic.
But I enjoy Christmas and Easter and so forth as celebrations of life, and family, and, well, celebration. Joyful and faithful and magical feelings are real feelings, and I believe in them, even if I don’t believe any particular way people try to explain, or justify, or “prove” them.
If the person to my left is partying about the the birth of a teacher, and the person to my right is partying about an oil shortage survived, and the person across the table is partying about the solstice, that’s all OK by me. It feels good to be around people who feel good, so I try not to worry about their reasons.
I realize that isn’t the whole picture. There are problems that arise from people’s feelings, and they way people try to explain or justify their feelings through religions, or logic, or strange mixtures of both.
But I don’t feel like talking about those problems, just now. In fact, that’s another thing to celebrate on holidays–especially secularized ones. It seems holidays help a lot of us forgive each other our differences, so we can all share in the celebration. Isn’t that cool?
My wife and I are both complete atheists, born Jewish (although our parents were not particularly religious either). We pretty much ignore Christmas and Easter. We do, to some extent, observe Jewish holodays. We fast at Yom Kippur for no discernible reason, but I never took off work (my wife did). We enjoy seders if someone invites us. We gave our kids and now give our grandkids “Chanuka gifts”, and sometimes one of us makes homantaschen at Purim, but the religious significance is ignored. Does all this seem contradictory? Very well, it is contradictory.
I am an atheist Buddhist, and I actually find the Christmas Story and Easter concept very spiritually significant. I get very emotional and nostalgic (as a former Christian) and seek out opportunities to sing hymns and think about what Christmas means to so many. I grew up with all of these traditions and I cherish them from a purely cultural and social perspective–but just watch how I weep when the choir sings The Little Drummer Boy.
Wow. Just when I was thinking I was the only one. Okay, I know there are lots of atheist Buddhists in the world, but you don’t often stumble across one.
While I don’t sign hymns, Little Drummer Boy and well-performed gospel standards still get me choked up and misty.
I make a point around Thanksgiving to list the things I’m glad and grateful to have in my life. Just because I’m not grateful to a deity doesn’t mean I’m not grateful for the good things and people around me.
Easter is just a Sunday I make damn sure I don’t have any plans to eat out. Same with Mother’s Day since she died in 01.
For me, Christmas is for giving presents to the kiddies, and for having dinner with my family.
Or it would be, if I didn’t live in a different country to my family. Though I do visit every so often.
I fulfill the obligations of my SO, who’s a Christmas fanatic, but nothing more. I finally have her to where she only buys me socks and underwear, but it took years.
I admit to hating everything about Christmas, from decorations, to gift-giving, to special meals, to churchvertisements, to the never-ending, mind-numbing, teeth-shattering, ubiquitous, monotonous, saccharine Christmas music that bores right into my bone marrow.
I pay absolutely no attention to Easter.
I look at christmas as a celebration of the winter solstice more than as the birth of the Christ, as I don’t really believe in god, I was raised Jewish, and Jesus wasn’t born in winter anyway. Still fun to go to parties though 
And I LOVE Easter for one reason and one reason only: The Cadburry Cream Egg. Seriously. Last Easter-ish time I’d completely forgotten what time of year it is (come to think of it, I don’t actually know when easter is…) but I was in a drug store and my eyes happened upon a box of Cadburry Cream Eggs, I literally yelled “Oh Sweet Jesus they’re BACK!!!” which scared a fellow shopper who was next to me. I bought ten of the bastards. Sweet cadburry overkill
Most years I successfully do nothing for all of the religious holidays (and most of the secular ones) beyond not going to work on that day (though if the option were available on many days I would so I could use the day off some other more convenient time).
When it comes to Christmas I’m of the view that when you force secular society to observe your religious holiday, you don’t get to bitch when it ends up secularized. So I don’t have a problem in those years when I get dragged into family Christmas stuff, it just doesn’t happen most years (I live a 1000 miles from the nearest family member).
Easter is just a Sunday (and it isn’t uncommon for me to realize it passed without me noticing).
Thanksgiving is probably the holiday I do something for most reliably (since usually there is an “orphans” dinner going on somewhere and I like my friends) but that isn’t particularly religious.
Those are the only two religious holidays that I can think of that might intrude on my calendar.
I only do stuff 'cause everyone else is. I usually cook all the holiday meals, but dislike gift giving (in another thread, I mentioned that I only give gifts to my Mom/Stepdad and Inlaws. Everyone else can go hang.) I generally like the atmosphere of the Christmas season. I suppose I still have lingering traces of neo-Paganism in that I just generally celebrate the change of seasons.
I also have a nativity scene that I would love to have the space to set up. It was my Grandma’s and I have a lot of happy memories of putting the creche up with her. Plus my husband’s Catholic. I go to mass with him on the holidays (He’s a CEO Catholic).
I send gifts at Christmas, but don’t do a whole lot else. This year we’re holding off the “celebrating” part until Saturday the 27th.
For New Year’s my wife and I do a few things, mainly because my MIL is a relatively observant practitioner of Shinto, but mostly it involves remembrance of immediate family members who’ve passed away.
I’m trying to be a Halloween missionary in my neighborhood and start up some local trick-or-treating, at least among the families in our condo.
That’s as religious as my holidays get. No Easter, no nativity scenes, no saints days.
I fear to inform you that the religious aspect of the few holidays that are intended to be religious not only isn’t present for almost all Americans, but historically probably wasn’t really there to begin with. Your religious holidays are really window dressing on the Spring and Winter solstices.
I just get so tired of hearing this. So, what the fuck does it matter? The pagan spring and winter solstice traditions of one culture drew from the one before, and on and on. Humans probably stole it from the habits of chimps who took it from lemurs and on and on.
I have slowly become a Scrooge over the years. Now every time I see one of the many movie adaptations, including the classic Scrooged, I think that poor Ebenezer was right and just very, very misunderstood. Why couldn’t all those jerks just leave him alone?
Unfortunately, I am only one person against a tide of Christmas sentiment. Every year I declare we will not have a tree. Every year, my husband makes it until Christmas Eve andthen snaps, and up goes a tree. Ever year, I say no gifts. Every year, there are gifts. Every year, I say “Can’t we just chill out at home” and every year, I am coaxed, goaded, guilted, and pushed into family festivities. I hate the forced gift-giving aspect, I can’t afford good presents anyway, and I don’t particularly have fun. My sister loves the song It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year and thinks I should, too. I pointed out that that song, as all Christmas songs, are a big fat lie. None of those things ever happen, the thing everybody is celebrating didn’t happen, but at least I get to be hundreds of dollars in debt over it!
Bah humbug indeed.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do not go out of the way to ruin everybody’s holiday. I don’t bitch about it to anybody. I buy everybody gifts. I make sure to visit my whole family. I watch Christmas movies with them. I try not to be too Grinch-like. I don’t behave like Scrooge, I just empathize with him a hell of a lot.
Yes, but try saying that to a true believer: “What?!? It’s the birth of our Lord and Savior, not some pagan tree worshiping winter holiday, and how dare you suggest otherwise.” It sort of puts the whole thing in perspective, when you think that Christmas is just the most recent incarnation of a celebration of an astronomical phenomenon. Takes some of the hoodoo out of it. Makes me enjoy it more too, actually.
Just because you have heard it over and over doesn’t mean the OP has. He obviously hasn’t or he wouldn’t have started the thread.
The holidays have never been particularly religious, so there’s no particular reason to think it odd for an atheist to enjoy them. It’s not a vast leap of logic unless you grew up in a very religious house where the holidays really were consider and presented as holy-days, and you’ve not been exposed to anything else. But if you did, the explanation is short and sweet and yes, often said.
Here’s the deal: I don’t believe a single word of the Nicean Creed is literally true, but there is a lot about Anglicanism that is very attractive, probably because of the good memories and warm fuzzies that I associate with it. Plus, the little Episcopal church here in town that my brothers and I all grew up in is struggling just to stay alive, and they desperately need experienced chalisters and lay eucharistic ministers. So, I help out because they’re really good people and I love them, even if I don’t believe anything in the Bible is literally true. So yes, I celebrate the religious holidays. I cannot explain how the communion experience makes me feel good, it just does, so I go. Sometimes.
I like Thanksgiving and I don’t really see it as a religuous holiday. I absolutely loathe Christmas, so much so that being around Christmas stuff puts me in a funk, but I try to keep it in check for people around me who like it.
Sure do.
Here in the atheist Netherlands, we don’t celebrate Halloween or Thanksgiving, but for cultural reasons. But we celebrate St Nicholas day on December 5 th with gifts and poems for our extended families; then Christmas with a tree, family dinners and perhaps going to night mass.
In the spring, the Dutch celebrate Easter with a lavish breakfast, chocolate eggs and bunnies, egg painting, and an egg hunt. Personally, I often seek out to go to a Catholic Easter Mass for the candles, the singing and the blssings, although I cringe at the sermons which mention peace&love and, in the same sentence, “Oh Lord make the Egyptians drown in the Red sea”-prayer.