Traditional Christmas rant - oh, I loathe Christmas

I deeply dislike Christmas. Since around the time I was twelve or so I haven't actually liked gifts - my mother was terrible at giving them, not the content of the gifts but how she gave them; on my birthday one year she pretended to have forgotten my birthday and waited until I exploded about how she'd forgotten and then exploded back at me about how she did get me presents and she did remember my birthday but she was just trying to build tension by pretending she'd forgotten. There were several experiences like that, so I actually dislike gift giving as a Pavlovian thing. When I was a child, however, I still liked the religious aspects of it, church and singing and such.

Then I became an atheist. Because Christmas was, for me, always a religious holiday, when I became an atheist I gave up Christmas. It was actually out of respect for the religion. I don't celebrate Christmas in the same way I don't celebrate Ramadan or Holi or Shavuot. At this time I didn't particularly dislike Christmas, either. Indeed, part of me still yearned for it because I did enjoy the music and church and the rest of it, but a yet bigger part of me would have felt disrespectful for celebrating a holiday for a religion that I found quite absurd.

Then this really weird thing happened. People would ask me what they should get me for Christmas and I'd say, "Nothing. I don't celebrate Christmas. I'm not a Christian." Then they'd try to talk me into celebrating it! They'd say it was a secular holiday (it is, weakly, but it is much more a religious holiday) so my reasons were silly or wrong somehow. Almost inevitably they'd end up by telling me that they'd get me a gift, anyway.

I really hate that. That's the proper word. Hate. Because what it does is ignore me. It ignores the way that I, Chris Bradley, really feel about gifts in general and celebrating Christmas in particular. This has caused me to see Christmas in an entirely different light. I feel Christmas is a very selfish holiday. Everyone gets so wrapped up in whatever it is that they are feeling, well, they don't really have time to be honestly generous or loving or even peaceful.

Take this Christmas season - a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death. The customers broke down the doors of the Wal-Mart and when this regular guy tried to stop them from literally invading the store they trampled him to death. Beyond the death itself, how does that show any "Christmas spirit"? How is that about generosity, love or peace? Everyone is in such a hurry! Traffic accidents skyrocket, violence skyrockets, people are brusque and rude, everything about Christmas - except a few parties - is pretty unpleasant really. And deeply selfish. Like those people at Wal-Mart - and tens of thousands of other places all across America - where people started the holiday season by mobbing stores.

So, in actual behavior, I feel there is a real deep hypocrisy about Christmas. People aren't being generous. Generosity isn't giving your kid an Xbox 360. Generosity is . . . creating a society with no poor. Not giving to a food bank once a year (often just cleaning out canned goods from your cupboard) or giving something to a Toys for Tots thing, but eliminating the social need that makes people that vulnerable in the first place. Generosity is feeding the poor all year long, making sure our schools are good, making sure that everyone has medical care, outreaching to people in countries poorer than ours (all of them) to make sure they've got enough food to eat and their kids go to good schools and have medical care. It is not about trading gifts with people. That is a parody of generosity - giving people who don't need anything things they don't need!

It's not about peace. If it was about peace, instead of going shopping and to parties, people would be petitioning the government to get out of Iraq, to shut down Guantanamo Bay's illegal prison. It would be about working to end the scourge of war both here and abroad. But you can't do that because to get political wouldn't be in the spirit of the season, which is absurd.

It's not about love, because you don't need - indeed you can't - buy love. Love is something you feel, and while you can work on feeling love, greater love, both for those you know and those you don't, there is nothing about Christmas that invokes love with the possible exception of the actual Christmas feast. (Eating good food with people you love is a way to keep the bonds of love strong. Companion is Latin for "people you share bread with".) Shopping, gifts, all that, has nothing to do with love.

So, when I tell people I don't celebrate Christmas and they try to talk me into it, often with emotional manipulation and always over my (I feel) reasonable objections, they're being selfish and offensive. They show no generosity, charity, peace or love for me by ignoring my clearly expressed, reasonably and easy to follow request to be left out of Christmas. They focus on their need or desire to force others into celebrating this holiday. They show, indeed, quite a bit of contempt for me - that my requests aren't worth following. It pisses me off. And it happens so damn often that it's entirely poisoned the season for me. Entirely.

Since I stopped celebrating Christmas, I have grown in understanding. I understand that many atheists and agnostics are cultural Christians - Christianity is a foul religion, true, but it is also an integral part of European and American civilization - our history is bound up in innumerable complex ways with Christianity. And much like people can go to medieval recreation societies, or Civil War recreation societies, and appreciate how feudalism or the Confederacy shaped their history without wanting to recreate feudalism or the Confederacy, people can celebrate Christmas without endorsing Christianity. I see that.

But for so long people have been telling me that I'm silly for not celebrating Christmas that it's stripped off the mask. I see the fnords. Christmas is a giant hypocrisy, where selfish people make a mockery of the very principles that the celebration is supposed to be about. Not to mention that so many Christmas celebrants have been rude and arrogant to me, personally, that I have no desire to "celebrate" Christmas. For me, it's just a sad and ugly time that's made all the sadder and uglier because of the hypocrisy of it - that except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day it's all just a consumer driven holiday, that the Christmas Season is a marketing ploy that pisses over the supposed principles of the season. That instead of being a time of joy, it's a time of stress mitigated by one day's celebration after six weeks of lousy traffic, drunken drivers and chaos in the marketplaces.

Ironically, and I'm poignantly aware of this irony, it's actually religious people who listen to me when I say I don't celebrate Christmas. They always go, "Oh, yeah, I understand that." They might believe my soul is damned to hell, but they grasp why a non-Christian doesn't celebrate the holiday.