An Atheist Christmas

Hey guys! So yeah, I don't know how many people read this or saw my last post, but those who do are aware by now that I'm an atheist. In fact, this Christmas is my fourth Christmas as a non-theist. A lot of people wonder what Christmas is like for atheists. Many other people assume what Christmas is like for atheists—the season just wouldn't be complete without Facebook posts and forwarded emails about how the evil atheists are trying to destroy Christmas by getting rid of nativity scenes in front of courthouses and forcing people to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” There's a war on Christmas, didn't you know?

I'm not going to pretend that there aren't some nutty atheists out there, although I've never met any (online or in real life). But most atheists in the western world actually enjoy and participate in Christmas. You may also be surprised to learn that most atheists object to the commercialism and materialism that accompanies the season just as much as any Christian. These misconceptions stem from the fact that Christmas is undeniably a religious holiday, at least in origin. How could an atheist enjoy that? The answer is complex and varies from individual to individual, but the root of the answer is that Christians don't own Christmas.

This is a pretty brazen assumption on its face. It's called Christmas, after all! Christ's mass! We celebrate Jesus's birth on Christmas! Hold on just one minute, though. Let's talk about the history of Christmas. You probably know that winter celebrations and holidays were around long before Christianity was a thing. Most of our modern Christmas traditions aren't Christian in origin at all, but are repurposed pagan traditions. During the middle ages, one way the Christian church (the Catholic church really, but at the time that was the same thing) spread its beliefs to the heathens was through an age-old process called syncretism. Syncretism is essentially the process where one religious group assimilates the traditions of another religious group, often under a new name. A great example of this is the incorporation of the Greek pantheon into the Roman religion—Zeus became Jupiter, Aphrodite became Venus, and so on. The same thing happened with Catholicism and various pagan traditions. Saturnalia, Yule, Solstice, and other celebrations became Christmas in the Christian tradition. Christians simply did what countless other religious traditions had done before them, and adopted and adapted the conventions of other groups to fit their own system. Over time, Christians adopted the traditions of those groups and incorporated them into their own holiday, giving new meaning to those traditions.

My point in describing this is to demonstrate that saying that Christ is the reason for Christmas makes very little sense when you consider the history of the holiday. If Christianity never existed, we would still probably celebrate some kind of winter festival today. In fact, if Christmas really had originated as a celebration of Christ's birth, assuming such a thing happened and assuming that the Biblical account is accurate, we would be celebrating it in the springtime, not the wintertime.

Despite all this, of course, Christmas does have a long Christian tradition and is heavily imbued with Christian meaning—which is exactly what you'd expect from a syncretically adopted holiday, but that doesn't change the cultural and religious importance of Christmas to modern Christians. But to say that only Christians can derive any significant meaning from the holiday ignores the very origins of that holiday. Sometimes I wonder if the Roman pagans complained about Christianity's co-opting of Saturnalia in much the same fashion that Christians complain about atheists having their own spin on the holiday.

So, back to the original topic: atheists and Christmas. What does Christmas actually mean to me? As an atheist, obviously the message of “Jesus is born, yay!” doesn't mean a whole lot to me. But many of the traditional messages of Christmas still have meaning for me. “Peace on earth, good will to men (and women)” is a sentiment that I think everyone, regardless of religious beliefs, can get behind. I like the traditions of Christmas—spending time with family, giving gifts and making treats. I like the decorations and the music. In fact, I generally prefer religious Christmas music to tunes like “Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer”, which generally annoy me. At its root, both today and throughout its various incarnations in various cultures and religions, Christmas is a winter festival, and I enjoy that aspect of it. Perhaps most importantly, celebrating Christmas as an atheist has forced me to think through and articulate to myself the meaning of the holiday in my own life, which is always a useful endeavor. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and perhaps the unexamined holiday is not worth celebrating. 

Merry Christmas!