O Come All Ye Faithful…

I spent quite a lot of my afternoon stringing fairy lights, listening to Bing Crosby and sipping hot cocoa, so it follows that Christmas has been very much on my mind all day.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear that none of the following was written with the intent of offending anybody. On the contrary, I hope that, by the end of this entry, I have succeeded in paying most of you a compliment and inspiring you to carry the spirit of this season with you all year long.

It’s no big secret that I am an atheist. I don’t hate your god or have some sort of grudge against him/her/it; you can’t hate something you don’t believe in. I have as many good days and bad days as most of the other people I know. I have plenty to be thankful for, and I am thankful for my relatively comfortable life, my wonderful family, my fantastic and varied friends and acquaintances, the opportunities I’ve been able to pursue and the mistakes I’ve been able to learn from.

In other words, I’m just like most of you. Except I don’t believe in god.

Unlike a lot of my atheist fellows, however, I do celebrate Christmas. I see nothing wrong with this; my observance of the holiday was rarely, if ever, religious prior to declaring my atheism, and I find that I miss out on none of my favorite traditions now that I’ve come out of the closet, so to speak. I still watch Holiday Inn and White Christmas, I still bake and decorate cookies, I still string lights, I still sing carols, I still receive and give gifts, and I still watch the stars on Christmas Eve and secretly hope that I’ll see something sleigh-shaped fly overhead. I’m not immune to wonder or even a desperate, childlike hope that magic is real, especially when a beautifully lit Christmas tree is nearby.

I draw all this happiness from the season without a belief in the virgin birth that supposedly inspired it or the pagan rituals that fueled it. For me, it is simply the one time of the year when people who wouldn’t otherwise do so open their hearts to everyone around them and give everything they can to help their fellow man. We donate toys to financially destitute families so that as few children as possible have to go without on Christmas morning. We drop our hard-earned cash into red metal pots for nothing more than a thank-you from someone ringing a bell. We donate more money to more charities at Christmas than at any other time of the year.

If all this giving had everything to do with religion, we wouldn’t notice a difference when the lights and evergreen boughs come down on January 2nd and stores go back to playing annoying secular music. But we do notice a difference. Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol tells us that Scrooge becomes a good person for the rest of his life after his experiences with the various ghosts of Christmas what-have-you, but it’s easy to believe that amidst the turkey and pudding and falling snow. If Scrooge is like the rest of us, he and Tiny Tim only ever stayed in Christmas Card Contact after the book ended.

Which is why I think that Christmas is no longer a religious holiday, if, indeed, it ever was. I wholly believe that Christmas is the secular humanist holiday of the year.

I normally think that “secular humanist” is a cop-out way of telling people you’re an atheist without actually using the highly offensive word “atheist.” But to call Christmas an atheist holiday is not correct because non-atheists celebrate it enthusiastically. But bear with me for a minute and I’ll do my best to explain what I mean.

Secular is the state of being separate from religion. Christmas, even though it bears the word, “Christ” in its name, is very easily a secular holiday, for millions of non-Christian people celebrate it every single year. While it is not yet a national holiday in Japan, more and more Japanese celebrate it the same way most of us do–with gift-giving and light-stringing and carol-singing–while less than 1% of the population actually claims to be Christian. My own country, the United States of America, celebrates Christmas as a federal holiday (and has since 1870) when the separation of church and state is a constitutional right afforded to American citizens by the First Amendment.

Some people choose to focus on religion during their Christmas celebrations and some choose to leave religion out of it, but regardless, anyone who chooses is able to partake in the myriad festivities. That is definitely not the case for any of the strictly religious observances I’ve encountered.

As I stated before, at no other point within the calendar year does the majority of the United States of America care more about humanity than it does at Christmas. This is precisely why Christmas can easily be recognized not just as a secular holiday, but a humanist holiday. While we’re out shopping for our loved ones, we often make donations we would not otherwise make to people we would not otherwise acknowledge, whether they be poor, starving, diseased, homeless, or foreign. While Thanksgiving is a time for recognizing what we have, Christmas is a time for recognizing what others do not have. And not just recognizing, remedying. And this is the humanist stance: that it is not enough to simply see that another human is suffering, it is the duty of all humans to make that pain go away.

But when White Christmas gets packed away with the fairy lights and the evergreen boughs, unfortunately a lot of people pack away their abundant generosity, too. Charities across the world count record highs in November and December only to count record lows in June and July when summer vacations are in full swing, and people are too busy packing their families into RVs to give a shit about anybody else’s suffering.

I have been as guilty as anybody else of this seasonal apathy. I am not pointing a finger at all of you and suggesting that, because I am an atheist or a secular humanist or a non-believer or whatever that I am more generous than you are. That’s not true. It takes a person to be kind and thoughtful, not a philosophy. A doctrine of generosity only appeals to people who are already generous to begin with.

But I will appeal to each and every one of you who gives a little more at Christmas to keep giving a little more all year long. I’m not even talking about cash. Spend some time with people at a nursing home listening to their stories and telling them a few of your own. Donate unwanted (clean) clothing to a not-for-profit thrift store. Stick up for someone you might normally pick on. Pick up trash you see in the park. Tell a cashier you like her earrings. If you’re able to, tell your parents that you love them. If you’re not able to, tell someone else that you love them.

We’re all here for a relatively short amount of time–the current world average is sixty-seven years–and after that, we can’t take anything with us, not even regret. So why even try?

Take care, everybody, and Merry Christmas.