Oh Come, All Ye Godless:
Christmas is a cultural rather than a religious holiday. This does not mean that there are no religious elements to Christmas - on the contrary, there are many religious aspects to Christmas. This is what we should expect from a cultural holiday because religion is an important aspect of culture. Culture, though, is more than just religion, and this means that there is more to Christmas than just religion, even though it's a day ostensibly set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the Christian savior. In fact, significant portions of Christmas celebrations today don't originate in Christianity at all.
No one celebrates every possible aspect of Christmas: some hang mistletoe, some don't; some drink eggnog, some don't; some have a creche, some don't. Everyone has traditions which are more meaningful than others, and most create some of their own "traditions." The result is that everyone picks and chooses certain aspects of Christmas to celebrate and others to ignore. If you want to celebrate a secular Christmas, just ignore the religious options.
There's plenty to choose from, though the Christian Right would have people believe that there is only one "definitive" set of traditions which represent a "real" Christmas. In effect, they would like to freeze Christmas as an idealized postcard version of the holiday, circa 1955, with "White Christmas" playing on an endless loop in the background.
This would drive most people clinically insane and it's not the sort of Christmas which anyone celebrates. I'm not sure that anyone ever really celebrated Christmas in this manner - it looks more like the manufactured nostalgia people create in order to feel better about their past. It's sometimes easier to get people to accept an ideology being imposed on them if they are told that it's "tradition" and the way things used to be rather than the truth: that it's a just a simulacrum of reality based upon an ideological preference for certain power structures.
and if the conservative die hard christians say we can't celebrate "their" holiday
then i say festivus for the rest of us
No one celebrates every possible aspect of Christmas: some hang mistletoe, some don't; some drink eggnog, some don't; some have a creche, some don't. Everyone has traditions which are more meaningful than others, and most create some of their own "traditions." The result is that everyone picks and chooses certain aspects of Christmas to celebrate and others to ignore. If you want to celebrate a secular Christmas, just ignore the religious options.
There's plenty to choose from, though the Christian Right would have people believe that there is only one "definitive" set of traditions which represent a "real" Christmas. In effect, they would like to freeze Christmas as an idealized postcard version of the holiday, circa 1955, with "White Christmas" playing on an endless loop in the background.
This would drive most people clinically insane and it's not the sort of Christmas which anyone celebrates. I'm not sure that anyone ever really celebrated Christmas in this manner - it looks more like the manufactured nostalgia people create in order to feel better about their past. It's sometimes easier to get people to accept an ideology being imposed on them if they are told that it's "tradition" and the way things used to be rather than the truth: that it's a just a simulacrum of reality based upon an ideological preference for certain power structures.
and if the conservative die hard christians say we can't celebrate "their" holiday
then i say festivus for the rest of us