surely us celebratory types get more attention when people shower us with gifts, cards, fine foods and booze?

just a thought...

I realise this has little to do with the thread.

Therefore I am not an attention seeking cockfarmer.

I just hate giving/receiving presents on that scale

I don't think I'm doing this to draw attention to myself at all. In fact, I would much rather not have to discuss it or explain it to people in conversation. But now that you've got me started thinking about it, I really do rather resent the implication that there's something wrong with not celebrating a holiday that originates in a belief system I would rather see wither away. THEY HAD 15 YEARS TO INDOCTRINATE ME AND THEY FAILED.

I've said before that I think it needs to be commercialised more, and we could do with expunging that vestigial religious thing completely from it. I don't feel that I'm celebrating the birthday of someone in whom I don't believe and even if there was such a historical figure I'm not having this 'son of god' nonsense and anyway this wasn't when he was born anyway, I'm having time off work and partying and watching loads of TV.

The festival at this time of year is ancient, but it may well be as recent as David suggests that it was named Christmas and deemed Jesus's birthday.

South Park to thread!

Martin, in some early manuscripts of the New Testament, there is reference to a sheep named Rodeph with a "glowing visage."

But just like the fur slipper. . .

but it doesn't originate in that belief system: it wz borrowed from another more fattening belief system (="i believe the sun will return in spring but just to make sure let's all eat this enormous pudding") to spice up the dour newbie

mark s, you're right to the extent that you're right. However, solstice was adapted and turned into a celebration of Jesus's birth. I can sing Christmas carols now and claim that I am really singing them to celebrate Winter Solstice, but it's kind of hard to ignore the Christian content in lines like "Second Adam from above, reinstate us in thy love."

I remember saying to my brother one time that I celebrated a paganized verstion of Christmas, when he bothered me about the fact that I celebrated it at all--so fine, I've decided for that, and for many other reason, to opt out of it entirely. I'm not really enough of an old time pagan to really seriously try to re-subvert (?) Christmas back to its winter solstice roots, and even celebrating winter solstice itself feels like a pale imitation of Christmas as I once knew it.

i like singing carols: i convinced myself when small and concerned abt such things that it didn't count as lying if i was singing it (this is how i squared being in the choir w.being an atheist)

"in the bleak midwinter" is best, it's like anti-solstice propaganda!!

Christmas carols are great, but I can't enjoy singing them if I'm around anyone who really believes them.

Knowing this, I still don't celebrate Xmass. I hate presents, I hate the commercialism, I hate the cheese. I grew up in Florida where there is no fucking snow or reindeer or mistletoe or even winter, and one day just realized how fucking meanless to me all the traditional Xmass symbols were. So, I have nothing to do with it.

One more thing that pisses me off --"Holiday" instead of Christmas.

"Holiday" is for crass materialist motherfuckers.

Hannukah and Kwanzaa rock too. Just not as much as Christmas. They will always take the backseat to Christmas. But how could they even compete in the first place?

"Christmas was never considered an important religious holiday"

Right now. It's the second most important just behind Easter.

I'm a little surprised my sister and her husband continue to celebrate Christmas, since there's not real Biblical warrant for it, but I guess they at least don't think there's any prohibition on such things.

It annoys me when people say it's Easter, not Christmas, that's religiously significant though. You can't have Easter unless you have the incarnation first.

They couldn't, precisely because Christmas is first and foremost an opportunity for the conquering Christian hordes to announce to the rest of the world: "We won! You get to celebrate our holiday whether you like it or not! Get used to it, muthafu**az! You gotta say our God's name a million times every December and there ain't nothin' you can do about it! We got the hearts and we got the minds!" At which point they begin an end-zone dance which while not as great as the Superbowl Shuffle is at least better than the already-forgotten Dirty Bird.

Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess. . .

i) it is a pagan festival pretending to be a Chistian one.

ii) I gather that it is inferrable from the Bible that Jesus was not born in December. Specifically because shepherds in that part of the world wouldn't have their sheep out at that time of year.

I do think people who live in countries where most people celebrate christmas are attention-seekers if they choose to reject it. In much the same way that I would be a vadgemonkey if I lived in the United States and demanded the right to go to work on Thanksgiving.

We had a debate at my university about whether we should have a tree: UCL was the third university founded in Britain, in reaction to Oxford and Cambridge refusing to admit Jews. It's been known as "that godless institution" for a very long time, and with pride - and it still offers no religious courses at all.

Actually, the most angry protest against our Christmas tree was from a professor (John Sutherland) whose reasoned basis was "they're spending money on a Christmas tree and the bloody heating in my office doesn't work!", which is (you may have spotted) not a theological reason.

I think this is a ridiculous claim. Fuck what most people celebrate. (I am just being true to my non-conformist Protestant heritage.) I have my reasons for not celebrating Christmas, which I think I've already made clear. I don't generally go on about it, but this is the internet where I generally go on about everything.

(I actually sort of dislike the conflation of Christmas with nearby holidays like Hanukkah. I mean, Jews happen to have a sort of minor holiday during the same month that involves gift-giving, and suddenly we all pretend that it's just their quaint Jewish "version" of Christmas? There's something deeply patronizing about this.) (As for Kwanzaa: it's a made-up communitarian non-religious holiday that's perfectly cool if you're into it, but it's not as if there are so many people who celebrate it instead of Christmas. On the plus side I think it takes the edge off of the patronizing Hanukkah thing: suddenly it's "happy holidays" like whatever you happen to be into doing this month, even if someone just made it up a couple decades ago cause it seemed cool, I hope you have a nice time at it.)

I'm not a Christian but I don't really belong to any religion anymore and when I did they didn't have a good heathen pagen ceremonial event so I still "did" Christmas.

PS Easter eggs are also part of this whole stolen tradition. HOWEVER Easter sucks cos pets die on Easter

But that's just the first step to the whole goal of the process which is the death/sacrifice. Everything is trivial compared to this.

naturally this looks like a lot of after-the-fact gymnastics to me, but there you go

Does anyone know why Chistmas is called that, because I don't think the pagen hordes that invented it would give it a name like that.