Oh, CNN…how nice of you to sucker us in with flattery before asking us to write a story for you.
Nonbelief is on the rise. Experts predict that faith in a higher power will eventually disappear from the West, and Americans who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition are the fastest growing “religious” group in the country. If you’re an atheist, agnostic, or nonbeliever of any stripe, we want to know: How do you celebrate the holidays, if at all?
Go ahead — tell them how we can have a holiday season without religion.
(via Cuttlefish. Of course he told his story with a poem.)
Cursing God, pledging my life and soul to Darwin for yet another year, and roasting Bill Donohue’s spleen over a roaring Bible fire.
Do any of the non-religious celebrate differently?
Glen Davidson
Many pass by my house on their way to church, I favour leg-hold traps and dead-falls.
I celebrate by not watching CNN.
We all celebrate Christmas without God. Some of us just don’t know it.
I build model rockets and I jerk off.
Killed By Fish
Yep, were it not for the Magic Sky Fairy, I’d never enjoy getting together with friends, being nice to people, shtupping the spouse, lighting candles, listening to music, baking cookies, making fun stuff with sheep fur…
What the fuck is WRONG with these people?
And while I’m at it, I’d love for everyone to realize that Hanukkah is not “the Jewish Christmas,” that it’s a piddly small but fun holiday, and that this time of year is not “majorly stressful” for everyone.
/grinchmode
Might do this later, a lot of work to sign up for iReport. I think I’ve got a good story, though: My wife, atheist, raised Jewish; myself, atheist, raised Mormon… we get to celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah, without the slightest bit of conflict or guilt.
I celebrate it pretty much the same way as all the christians I know do, only with (some of!) the mind numbingly stupid/boring bits removed.
I view this as a little personal victory.
“I celebrate by not watching CNN.” No help there, jimmauch. That’s what I do every day.
“I’m going to spend it in bed with the woman I love. Or maybe we’ll go to a Newtonmas party and play board games.”
I’ll be surrounded by family, drinking white wine in the sun.
Oddly enough, for years I’ve hosted “Orphans’ Christmas” for friends who couldn’t stand to spend Christmas with their religiously judgemental family members.
Just like the Christians in my family do – I spend too much, I eat too much, and I enjoy the holidays with raucous revelries. Okay, so the Christians in my family tend to be the dour self reflective types but it all works out.
I like Tom Lehrer’s Christmas Carol:
Christmas time is here, by golly, Disapproval would be folly, Deck the halls with hunks of holly, Fill the cup and don’t say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, Mix the punch, drag out the dickens, Even though the prospect sickens, Brother, here we go again.
On christmas day you can’t get sore, Your fellow man you must adore, There’s time to rob him all the more The other three hundred and sixty-four.
Relations, sparing no expense’ll Send some useless old utensil, Or a matching pen and pencil. Just the thing I need! how nice!;
It doesn’t matter how sincere it Is, nor how heartfelt the spirit, Sentiment will not endear it, What’s important is the price.
Hark the herald tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things. God rest ye merry, merchants, May you make the yuletide pay. Angels we have heard on high Tell us to go out and buy!
So let the raucous sleigh bells jingle, Hail our dear old friend kris kringle, Driving his reindeer across the sky. Don’t stand underneath when they fly by.
Celebrating family and friends with family and friends. In Florida. With sparklers at midnight.
And, of course, the greatest Christmas carol ever, from Pogo:
<a href="http://www.igopogo.com/deck_us_all.htm"Deck us all with Boston Charlie.
Something went wrong with the anchor tag above. Here’s the URL unadorned. http://www.igopogo.com/deck_us_all.htm
On Christmas itself I go to my uncle’s house to see all of my conservative relatives and drink expensive liquors. Luckily for me I’ve always been a bit reserved so I can get away with going off by myself if things get too WASPy.
The rest of the month of December has some nice new holidays for gathering with friends. The 5th is the day of Chrimbus which we celebrated for the first time this year; it sort of turned into a plant exchange/weird outfits party but it doesn’t really have an established tradition given that it’s really just a weird Tim and Eric sketch.
The 23rd, of course, is Festivus. We always forgo the traditional Festivus meal in favor of whatever anyone cares to bring because nobody can ever seem to remember that there is one, and we’re all just there to get drunk and wrestle anyway. If you’re going for a true Festivus, make sure you don’t wear clothes that you’re particularly fond of as the Feats of Strength usually result in at least one ripped or stretched article of clothing.
I’m stuck with family, so never mind, but… remember the original reason for the season: kurisumasu is the Japanese celebration of love and rampant consumerism.
Also, cookies. ^_^
I have posted my contribution under the heading ‘A Secular Christmas’. Also, in the UK, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A8KT365wlA
This song has been played endlessly every Christmas now for nearly forty years. If you follow the link, check out Wizzard whose festive hit came from the same year and has likewise been played to death ever since.
David Marjanović
Almost everything in Japan is an excuse for rampant consumerism.
and cookies.
and wrapping everything in at least 4 layers of paper.
You BASTARD stonyground!
You unmitigated GIT!
Posting a fucking link to fucking Slade
Bastard!
http://festivusweb.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus
being with loved ones, family and friends is as good as it gets at festivus time.
Don’t forget Good King Sauerkraut.
David Marjanović: is it true that KFC sort of tricked Japan into thinking their food is traditional for Christmas? Someone told me that when I was in college but I could never figure out if she was messing with me or not.
I would’ve told them, but it wasn’t worth signing up on their site just say that I don’t celebrate Christmas because it’s just another day to me.
xkcd has that covered.
Hey, SteveV… could have been worse.
I’ll be surrounded by family, drinking
white winebeer in thesunfreezing cold and snow.LOLsob.
Can I come? To get away from the Fox News brainwashed family members!
@SteveV
So glad that you appreciated it.
I suspect that most of us celebrate like everyone else, only without dour churchy crap. Probably we don’t feel the pressure to out-Christmas everyone or measure up to some media-promoted standard of the holiday.
So on the whole, we do it better.
I cry when I hear the Chrimbus Song for DeeVee.
Is there any weird thing that comes up on this blog that xkcd does not have covered?
Jeebus.
I went over and typed in my typical Christmas, which amounted to “Just like most people, but without any church stuff”. It wouldn’t accept the submission until I checked a “Discretion Advised” check box. Because I included the word “atheist”?
Oh, Lordy, Lordy.
That’s wonderful news but perhaps a bit optimistic. For example not far from where I live in Florida customers of a storefront church fill a large parking lot every single day, not just on Sundays. I see people reading the Bible in public, even at the beach. Religious brain damage is out of control in Idiot America.
— Human Ape
About every other year my girlfriend feels like decorating and having a traditional, secular Christmas morning. Since neither of grew up Christian, and our decorations don’t have anything to do with any religion, it just means a decorated house, a tree, and some presents on Christmas morning. I don’t even care that it’s called Christmas, since I think I was 10 or 11 before I knew that it was supposed to celebrate Jesus’s birth. (I was fifteen before I knew why Easter was a Christian big deal. I knew Jesus was crucified, but I’d never heard of the resurrection until a shocked and surprised nominally Lutheran friend explained it to me.) Growing up without Christmas traditions being intertwined in faith, I’m always amused by the “war on Christmas.” There is hardly anything Christian about the traditional Western celebration! What is there? Marking the day of Christ’s birth and gift giving? Gluttony, avarice and envy? “True” Christians should worry less about blowout sales being called Holiday (read: Satan) Sales and more about just getting their hypocrite asses down to church. Leave me to my gross consumer consumption.
Hmm, decisions, decisions.
Give CNN some info, possibly, potentially, maybe, helping the atheist cause. BUT, that also means helping their lazy asses out, which is bad because CNN likes laying off people and relying on free iReports. Even though many journalists suck at their jobs, we actually do need some around. Don’t think I can help CNN downsize.
Brownian: that’s actually my favorite song from the special but I didn’t think it would be a very good representative clip for anyone that hasn’t heard of Chrimbus. I sing the “I wish you were my son” and “I love you more than him” lines all the time to people I know well enough to sing in front of.
Probably not.
Speaking of unspeakable seasonal music, I was recently at a gas station, and over the loudspeakers, I heard… a reggae version of “Little Drummer Boy.”
*shudder*
For those who are looking for something different from typical holiday music fare, including plenty of non-Christian sentiments that are faithful to the true pagan origins of the holiday, I recommend checking out Nowell Sing We Clear. If you’re in the northeast USA you may even still have a chance to see them perform this year. Otherwise, they have many albums full of seasonal carols and songs that you’ve probably never heard before.
I don’t know about KFC fooling the Japanese, but KFC carry-out is a traditional Christmas meal. It seems amusing but that is just as good a tradition as anything else.
I wonder if CNN is aware that those notorious nonbelievers who founded the U.S. celebrated the first Christmas under the Constitution, Dec. 25, 1789, by meeting for a regularly scheduled session of Congress.
The GF™ and I sing it to our cat all the time (his name is B.B.). Only we wish he would shut up more often than we wish he were our son. And we tell him so via song.
Ooh, it’s like reverse “Family Feud!”
Let me not see The Laughing Coyote’s friend’s onionbum!
[Waits for a ‘ding’ or a ‘bzzt’.]
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
and a happy gnu year.
We’ll piss off all the Christians,
We’ll piss off all the Christians,
We’ll piss off all the Christians,
‘Cause we won’t kiss their ass’!
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
and a happy gnu year.
Now bring us some grog and bacon,
Now bring us some grog and bacon,
Now bring us some grog and bacon,
And some chocolate would be nice!
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
and a happy gnu year.
Now shut down a Christian church,
Or call it a holiday tree,
Or persecute poor Donohue,
And laugh at their myths.
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
We wish you a merry solstice,
and a happy gnu year.
Surely the more important question is why are so-called Christians dragging an evergreen into their houses to represent the forst spirits and giving it offerings of tinsel and baubles?
One of the few things I really appreciate that Garrison Keillor does is his campaign to eliminate the song “The Little Drummer Boy”:
heh
We celebrate by baking too many cookies, roasting a bird for convenient week-long noshing, giving and getting prezzies, and having a decorated tree. Oh, and taking a full week off work, because all the fishtians in my office are taking off for “holy”days anyway.
Two can play that game
We are going to play Russian roulette because as atheists we have nothing to live for.
Not really, just a joke. This is however, probably what CNN will put in their story. No reason to trust the media. Now if it was Fox news, we would all be out looking for puppies to kill or something. Plus stealing baby jesus from nativity scenes and waterboarding him.
My parent grew up on a farm during the Great Depression, the eldest of five children of Hungarian immigrants.
In Hungarian Christmas mythology, it is kis Jézust (baby Jesus) who brings the presents.
One year my parent covered self with a sheet and sat by the chimney moaning and claiming to be kis Jézust, terrifying the siblings.
They don’t make Christmas memories like that any more.
How do I celebrate Xmas, as an unbelieving secularist, wicked person that I am?
I would love to say “with a barbecued baby for dinner, and side dishes of curried kittens and pickled puppies” but I’m afraid the truth is much more prosaic than that.
My Christmases run towards cookies, fruitcake, eggnog, turkey dinner with friends I’ve been having holiday dinners with for 35 years, gift exchange with a very few closest friends, and similarly pedestrian activities that wouldn’t be out of place in South Cow-Pat, Iowa. If I’m feeling exceptionally festive, I may hang my plastic wreath on the front door and put up a few strings of lights, but I gave up Xmas trees decades ago as just too much work.
My cats will probably get a can of Fancy Feast split between them as a special treat, and a bag of catnip.
Quick! Give me upvotes before CNN catches on and removes me!
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-715366
Just think: if every single person suddenly vanished from the Earth (Kirk Cameron & Timothy LaHaye, eat your hearts out!) there would still be a Winter Solstice.
“…Because I included the word “atheist”?
Oh, Lordy, Lordy.”
You did that on purpose!
There’s really only one way for a non-believer to celebrate the season: Agnostica.
From what I remember, the “agnostica season” starts on quantum mechanics day and continues for an unspecified period of time into the new year.
Relaxing on a beach in Thailand!
[OT]
reynoldhall, looking at that website, agnostica has fallen into desuetude.
(I wonder why! ;) )
Oh, it’ll be back! Just wait’ll until Dec 14*! The “nukees” webcomic usually puts it up around then.
*fingers crossed, hoping that I won’t look** like Harold Camping*
**also hoping that my prediction doesn’t fail either!
What I submitted to iReport at CNN:
As a non-believer of only 3 years, I know well the celebrations thru the eyes of belief. And I now know it through the eyes of unbelief.
The Christian story is preceded by the now Mythological gods such as Horus and Mithras. Only those ignorant to the facts, those blinded by faith could believe that, “Jesus is the reason for the Season”.
Christmas and specifically the 25th of December has been hijacked by the Christians from the pagans and their antique celebrations of the Winter solstice.
If truth is what man seeks, then in just minutes one can be enlightened on the history of the season and celebration all without having to resort to a book full of fairytales.
However, I love it, after spending almost 40 years celebrating an imaginary deities birth, I enjoy as much or more the season with my new found reason. I share, I give, I love and enjoy seeing others do the same.
It has made no impact on my ability to enjoy the holidays.
Let me ask you, the reader, when you came to know that Santa was fictional, did it lesson your joy for the season? Are you now an unhappy twit groveling in self pity? I doubt it.
You sucked it up and sought solace in being counted among the mature and informed whom know he doesn’t exist. Too be honest you probably found great pleasure in this inevitable right of passage.
It is the same with atheism. I reveled in knowing that I was to be counted now with the reasoned, the logical, the skeptics and the freethinkers.
When I found out that mammaw didn’t really make that famous pumpkin pie and that it was from a small store up the road; my tastebuds made no complaint.
When truth is found, there comes with it a sense of success, a sense of peace and a sense of pride.
Happy Holidays,
Cas Hinc
Hmm.
I give presents to a select group of people. I send cards—the conventional side of my acquaintance get charity Christmas cards, my online friends get home-made non-specific offerings (these included a stegosaurus and corsets—uh, on separate cards). I participate in a Secret Santa fanfic story exchange.
There will be a tree in my sitting room, decorated most tastefully with all the red and gold I can cram onto it. There’ll be a festive dinner on the 25th, with such of my family as can be there (a very small group). This year we’re eating a piglet. Nom. There will be no Christmas fruit cake because bleah, and I’ll probably make a mincemeat cheesecake instead of a Christmas pudding. While I prepare it I shall listen to “I’m sorry I haven’t a Christmas Carol”, the superb ISIHAC version of the Dickens story, and probably listen to Nsync singing ‘O Holy Night’, because yes. Later, we’ll watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and probably play some board games. I’ve put in a request for my daughter to bring Dixit.
And I’m singing carols in a concert/celebration/memorial next week. As my singing teacher tells me very firmly that I am a soprano, this year I get to sing the descants.
Basically, I pick the best bits. And also, sadly, to be irritated by the bovine renditions of ‘Christmas songs’ interminably played in the shops, and the importunings of doorstep carol singers who can’t sing and don’t attempt carols (but they only visit us once, heh, because I make them sing real carols before I give them anything), and more than usually witless Thoughts For The Day. But overall, a festival where people try to be nice to one another, and exchange gifts, has much to be said for it.
I see your Slade and raise you a Springsteen
@25
KFC on Christmas day is seen as a sort of “traditional” Western item – Our local KFC is taking orders for the Kurisumasu day KFC (You won’t get anything there on Christmas day without pre-ordering!).
My favourite Japanese クリスマス treat however is Japanese style Christmas cake – not the heavy fruitcake I remember from childhood, but Fresh cream strawberry shortcake (red and white for Xmas).
Chigau @21
but I love the fact that for a couple of hundred Yen they will professionally wrap your prezzies (ribons & bows extra) when you buy them, so that they look like the gifts in traditional Santa pictures (unlike the refugee from a recycle bin my own efforts resemble).
Sometime during the next couple of weeks I’ll get out the Hogfather dvd and watch it.
I like the Jehovah’s Witness’s iReport about how un-Christian Christmas actually is. Funny how this person can be so historically literate, yet still believe in the Sky Pilot.
I actually never really thought much about it. At some point, we got sick of hearing Christmas music *everywhere*, so stopped bothering with it at home. Later, the nativity had some pieces missing, and it ended up donated some place. Last thing “Christian” to die was the angel on the top of the tree, with little more than a sort of, “That is getting kind of old, I don’t think we will put it up any more.” The rest, pretty much is the same (though, we have had some issues side stepping some relatives who insist on still leading grace at the table during the dinners). It just kind of drifted away from the religious bits.
Though, I do wish my mother and father would reset their party affiliation to Democrat, so the right wing idiots would stop sending them stupid crap from Judicial Witchhunt, and other similar bullshit, which started showing up back when they decided to “protest” some idiocy from the Dems, by signing up as the other camp. So, we are not entirely out of the stupid, its just veiled under a load of fake secular “concerns” held by the lunatics, and presented as non-theological, because they know they have to do so to dupe the people that are slightly brighter than hard line church goers (or Glen Beck fans, given the insane rubbish I am trying to wash out of my brain from reading some of the comments on their, “Oh my god, the tree has condoms on it!”, post and poll.
Hmm, well I usually warm up with some gruel in my cold apartment, and then my perennial visitors, the badly costumed stalkers of Christmas t = n, (n-x) and (n+x) show up. These guys used to be really big into the evangelism thing, but now they just come to drink my homebrew. We have a party with some of my dead relatives, and then I wake up the next day and run a column.
I’m the wrong person to ask. I’ve never been there and don’t speak/read/write the language.
You don’t. There’s no such thing as “too many cookies”, heretic.
Slade for christmas?
In Sweden we listen to this music this time of year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23gu1Oxw6gA
Mer jul/ more christmas.
It’s all about more of everything really. No translation needed.
I celebrate with these, my LOTR Christmas Carols (written years and years ago now, so they’re charmingly historic and quaint and teenagerish, as all Christmas things should be).
The closest I’ve ever been to celebrating Christmas in Japan was Dec 26, but you do know that the most important holiday in Japan is New Year, so if anything Christmas is just a warm up to it. December is traditionally known as 師走 Shiwasu (“teachers running around”) because Buddhist monks have always been super busy in preparing for religious ceremonies connected to the end of year.
It seems that it has been marketed mainly as an opportunity to exchange gifts amongst loved ones, and also to children, although they also get presents on the much more important New Year holiday.
Japan has a culture of gift-giving, and there are a large number of occasions to exchange gifts, and Christmas has simply become one of them (others include Chūgen in summer, Seibo around New Year, February and March 14th etc. This is a country with only 1% Christians (although acc to some studies, 10% of the elite), but Christmas decorations and so forth have become quite common. The tradition of spending Christmas with your partner has been documented at least since the 30s (there were restaurants selling 1-Yen-Dinners to those “unlucky young men without a partner”, a 1930 Yen is 3000 of 2011 Yen). But it seems to have evolved more into a relaxing-with-family kind of holiday. According to this website,
– 56.8% of respondents spend Christmas at home
– 16.7% alone
– 16.3% with lover/partner (even for unmarried and/or younger people, this never goes above 25%)
– 4% with friends
– 1.9% with a restaurant dinner
– 1.4% of respondents spend Christmas “with their bed”
It can be concluded: the majority of Japanese people spend Christmas alone.
I’m sorry, my conclusion was wrong (I need an edit button).
The vast majority of Japanese spend it at home or alone.