How to (Not) Celebrate Christmas
The economic and ideological hijacking of religious holidays
It is Christmas Eve. Yet another year where I have slowly drifted from caring or even celebrating a religious holiday. As my religious posture has evolved over the years, I have gained a true affinity for the checkpoints of Christianity throughout the year like Advent, Christmas, and Easter. I believe these dates, or rather, what the dates suggest, is of utter importance to reflect on as often as one can. Each year I see endless debate on whether particular Christian holidays are of pagan origin or if the dates are exact and accurate. This has always been generally irrelevant to me; what matters is what the dates represent. Jesus was certainly born into this world, and certainly died here. Easter carries that death and the promise of the Christ’s resurrection. Whether we celebrate Easter in December, May, or April 20th, what matters is the acknowledgement of Christ’s taking on of the human form and propitiating God’s wrath on our behalf. Christmas acknowledges the birth of Christ, and the sermons around Christmas tell the story in scripture of Christ’s entry. So why do I celebrate less and less? Documenting the life of Christ, and the work He did is of utter importance for understanding the Christian faith. Acknowledging these dates is rudimentary for a decent Christian life. One must know of Christ’s works to gain even a vague understanding of why they go to church each Sunday. So why have I drifted from my religion’s special days, and have even grown bitter towards them?
I will focus on Christmas for this writing as tis’ the season, but just know what I write here regarding Christmas translates well over to Easter.
Christmas is paradoxically the most celebrated and most misunderstood holiday in the world. Almost everyone celebrates it, or at least celebrates an emaciated corpse of it. Jews, atheists, and I even know some Muslims who cannot help but buy presents, have a Christmas tree, and sing carols committing blasphemy against their god or lack thereof. This is because of the secular hijacking of Christmas and religious holidays in general. I am not one to attack secularism often as I have seen it save the world time and time again from the most irrational and superstitious religious maniacs. I have seen secularism save societies from utter moral decay. I have seen secularism educate individuals to adequately contribute to the world, rather than examine the innards of a slaughtered chicken.1 But secularism is de facto godless, and amoral in nature. Capitalism is no different, it is also amoral, it follows the path of least resistance towards unexamined gains. Public morality and borrowing from various religions in civil and corporate law ensures that society’s amoral aspects do not flow down deleterious streams. Thanks to the remnants of religion, we have moral laws to prevent capitalism from flowing down the path of least resistance. If it was not for acknowledging human dignity and inherit worth, we would still be sending children into mines with TNT, lacking a minimum wage, and working people more than forty hours a week. But we forgot to give secularism a moral hint as to the sacred nature of our holidays (holy-days). So secularism saw the benefits of time off work, gifts, fun little traditions, and thought it could ride along with us. Secularism, in the form of capitalism, has hijacked Christmas, tainting its true meaning.
I believe I celebrate Christmas and Easter best, by not celebrating them. By celebrate, I mean to partake in traditions and festivities as these do not truly represent the meaning of Christmas. Celebration however, also takes place in the subjective intellect. During Christmas, I attempt to posture myself towards the story of Christ’s birth, his difficulty with sociological identity, and the promise He bore from this identity on our behalf. To partake in the ludicrous spending of thousands of dollars on tokens of capitalism, to stress about plans of who I will eat dinner with, to feel pressure on having certain foods and drinks for the month, is to lose sight of the true meaning of Christmas. Do not get me wrong, I bought my wife a present, I plan to eat dinner with her and her grandparents, and I also want to make eggnog. But I cannot even say these ideas were second on the list for me after acknowledging Christmas, for they were not even on the list.
Each year I watch as companies make bullshit commercials with Santa Clause and drop prices so low so to still be profitable and drive up sales. The ‘meaning’ of Christmas has become a time for family, a time for ‘giving’, and a time for ‘love’. Although family is probably important, giving is a nice gesture, and love is the embodiment of Christ, these are hardly ever the interpretations we implement when participating in the economic rat race. I watched a few years back as my Aunt had bags under eyes and carried an aura of stress regarding the ‘need’ to buy presents for ungrateful people that she could not afford. To fail to buy these presents would make her a disappointment in the eyes of others. This strange and eerie predicament had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, yet it brought a Hell-like anxiety that Christ’s birth was to free us from.
I have learned to protest this hijacking of my religion by refusing participation. Although I am a proponent of capitalism and I sure do love the sales on my favorite gadgets, I have resisted the urge to click ‘pay’. Every purchase we make this time of the year is a positive feedback mechanism to the capitalist overlords that their hijacking of a sacred holiday is permitted. I will gladly take on the role of party-pooper to champion the intentionality of my religion. I will reiterate, you can buy gifts of friends and family, enjoy the good food, and have a fun vacation off work; but if these aspects even come close to distracting you from the meaning of Christmas, then you have become a victim to the amoral machine of secularism. More so, those who have no place participating in our religious holiday will continue to drown out the true meaning, ensuring rather well-intentioned Christians to be distracted, and possibly stressed like my aunt.
As a secular society, we do not hijack the Jewish holiday Tu B’shevat every January 25th. We do not acknowledge Hanukkah outside of jokes. We do not do anything as a society around Ramadan or Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). Christianity, the dominant religion in the developed world, has opened itself up to dangerous philosophies of consumerism and gluttony. You can drive down streets seeing houses decked out with hundreds of lights, inflatables, and yard decorations with a damn good estimate that they are not truly celebrating Christmas, but rather its secularized bastard child.
I encourage you to dedicate your mind and soul to understanding what the birth of Jesus Christ means to the world, and to you as an individual. Do not feel pressured to buy gifts and make the shareholders happy. Christ flipped tables when he saw His holy temple hijacked by greedy capitalist. To stress about bad family relations or your budget this Christmas might not only be unhealthy, but it might even be a sin to concern oneself with trivial matters over the most important birth in the universe.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Haruspices
I’d argue much of what you call secularism here is simply Christianity. Mass education, scientific, philanthropic, etc achievements that attainted peace, literacy, rooting people out of poverty was co-opted rather than lead by secularism.
But outside of that - good Presbyterians don’t follow the liturgical calendar. Join us!