Drinking beer and wrapping presents on Christmas Eve while watching “Bad Santa”
Fair enough. I’m not offended, although I think “what Christmas traditions are important to you” (which is noticeably different from “how do you celebrate Christmas”) and “what restaurants are good in NYC” are not remotely analogous.
Also I have to wonder why you included the Scrooge quote in your second list. I wouldn’t have posted at all if you hadn’t done that.
I checked giving and other. Every year my family provides gifts for families in need through a program called Adopt-a-Family. The gifts includes useful items like clothing and food, but also toys for the kids. In this world of commercialized Christmas I cannot imagine how sad it must be for a child to wake up on Christmas morning with no gifts, not to mention a warm coat or enough to eat. To me this is something important. It’s all done anonymously but sometimes we get back thank you notes with identifying information blacked out. Those notes are the greatest Christmas presents I’ve ever received.
What work? What crowds? What stress? What family obligations? You seem to think that Christmas has to be standing in line at a store to buy gifts and then spending a ton of time cooking and visiting with family you don’t like.
Holidays can be whatever you want them to be. Yes I do spend like 2 hours putting up lights, that’s probably my only “ton of work” thing. I do it because I enjoy seeing the lights every day.
I have a tree but it takes 10 minutes to put up. I’ve asked to not get gifts, so I don’t give gifts, except to my nieces and I buy everything online. I spend Christmas day sitting on the couch with my dad, watching Christmas movies. I visit my extended family if they have time.
The holidays don’t have to be whatever you see in the movies. They can be whatever makes you happy. Lights make me happy. The smell of cookies make me happy. Spending time with my friends makes me happy. The promise of the new year makes me happy. I don’t get to do any of that stuff with regularity during the rest of the year, so I make an extra effort to make sure I do all that lovely stuff around Christmas. It’s nice, not stressful.
I think there’s a LOT more assumption out there that “everyone loves Christmas” than for team sports etc. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for a reminder that not everyone is excited for Christmas, or that a recipe needs tweaking/won’t work for someone with an allergy. If everyone has the same experiences, likes the same things, has no differing opinion or outlook on a topic it would be a damned boring world.
I’m not a celebratory person by nature. That doesn’t mean I don’t like seeing/reading about what people who DO get into Xmas think. I also find it interesting to see the varying reasons the Bah Humbug folks like me have for feeling the way they do.
My favorite things include a delicious-smelling tree, lights and candles, baking, getting people together to sing/play instruments, play board games, drink eggnog, and maybe make a holiday craft if that’s their thing. I mean, I do these things all winter, because they’re cozy and fun, but around the holidays more people take part.
I could do without the gift aspect, though I do a quick online shop for gifts for the kids of the family. I don’t do cards, or any forced social events, or religious things.
100% Agreed. I think it’s because it’s Christmas, there is a bit of anti-religious sentiment (well, anti-Christian anyways) in wanting an option that I’m not going to celebrate it because I don’t believe it.
I wonder if there would be this much pushback if it was “What Sports traditions are important to you” or “What Hanukkah traditions are important to you”.
Counterpoint - *some *of us are happy celebrating what’s become a largely secular holiday even though we’ve already gone through atheism and are so far out the other side it’s no longer funny…
Don’t harsh our eggnog buzz, man.
It is rather quaint to think of Christmas as a religious holiday.
It is a somewhat minor Christian Holiday, promoted to supplant various European Winter Holidays. It is also a major celebration of capitalism and has been for at least 80 years now if not longer. But the older carols do go back to a time when it was a religious holiday and the people who wrote the carols probably weren’t aware of the history of Christmas.
I think for many of us, be we Christian, Atheist, Agnostic or something else and enjoying the time and celebration, the really important part of Christmas is the gathering of Friends & Families and maybe a little more Good Will than normal.
Santa is a fun little tale for many of us, a shared fiction with our kids.
I’m the laziest ass on the planet, and my personal christmas decorating is minimal, to say the least. However, I did put together a six-inch-tall lego christmas tree, and looking at that tiny little tree gives me an inordinate sense of pleasure (as can be determined by comparing it to looking at the other sets around it).
Why does this happen? Nostalgia. My brain associates christmas trees with good times of my youth, and reminds me that the season of family and giving is on the horizon. Other traditions reinforce that the family is still together and is still the same unit as it was before despite all the other changes. And gift exchanging is of course an acknowledgement of interest and care for the people close to you.
Of course I have the advantage that my mom is still alive, and is a christmasophile; I can experience decorations and feasts and events to my heart’s content with negligible effort. That will all go away when she passes on (unless my in-town siblings invite me over to their events), but even when there’s nothing else I’ll still lift a few fingers to pop in a christmas movie and remember the holiday.
I don’t consider Christmas to be christian at all - it’s a pagan winter celebration that went in one side of christianity and came out the other unchanged to a remarkable degree. Sure it picked up a name change, and candy canes, but the more overtly christian stuff that adhered to it (like nativities) can be easily discarded without being missed.
My family’s christian (well, mormon), and I simply need to stay away during the occasional pious stuff that happens and come back when it’s done. There’s so much holiday left over that I don’t even feel like I’m missing out.
We do!
What are your high priority Christmas traditions?
I voted for several:
Decorating a tree
An advent calendar
Egg nog
Decorating your house interior with knick-knacks and tchotchkes
Giving gifts
Feasting on the holiday (incl Xmas Eve) with family & friends
Going to church services
Going caroling
Listening to recorded xmas music (streaming, radio, CDs)
Other (please elaborate) — on Thanksgiving weekend we go to a tree farm and chop down our tree, then put t up and all the decorations.
It’s been 40 years exactly since my family moved from the northeast / New England to San Francisco and surrounds. I was 18 back then, and am 58 now.
Still, it feels much less Christmassy to me with the snow and cold weather that I grew up with 40+ years ago.
That’s fair, we have no Christian aspect left to Christmas except the name of the Holiday. Our tree is stuffed animals, Santas, Gandalf mixed in among the Santas, reindeer, icicles, and winter scenes. We do have a dreidel or 2 and some Star of Davids on the tree.
Well the gift giving part is probably from Christian tradition - though originally it was January 6 that was the gift giving day (being Epiphany) and it was moved to Christmas day during the Reformation.
Not really, gift giving was part of Saturnalia, a roman celebration of Saturn held in December. As Christianity dominated the Roman world the gift giving was associated with St. Nicholas in early December.
We do too! And since we’re both in the Bay Area, we could be prowling the same tree farms and fighting over the same tree.
(Although this year, it rained so much on the Saturday after Thanksgiving that we opted to just head for a tree lot, grab the first good looking one, and get out of the rain.)
But wasn’t Saturnalia’s gifts more of the ‘gag gift’ sort of thing (or terracotta figures)?
And while small gifts may be associated with St. Nick’s Feast Day, Epiphany is also well known for gifting (though these days more in Eastern Orthodoxy or Latin American - Three Kings Day, etc).
OK – I’ll add something I love not on the list; all the various “fractured Christmas songs” such and Bob Rivers and others do. And a personal shout-out for my all-time favorites from the Electric Amish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE7mX8mkyxMVacation days are about the only thing I care about anymore, Bah, Freakin humbug.