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A survey for those who don’t celebrate Christmas
- When did you stop celebrating?
- Why did you stop celebrating?
- How have family and friends responded?
- What do you do instead, if anything?
Disclaimer - I am not aiming to shame or undermine those who do celebrate, this is just friendly a discussion for those who don’t.
Have you ever considered that maybe your family and friends just want to see you and spend time with you? Just because you go to a party and have some food doesn't mean that it's inherently religious or that you're obligated to participate in gift giving/receiving - simple enough to politely request that nobody get you anything.
This is how I approach it. I don't celebrate the holiday, it's just a time that I see family for a day or so. I ask for no gifts but some people prefer giving them anyway, and with exceptions when I feel like it I don't give gifts in return. I've just decided to set that expectation.
Now, most of my family is pretty chill, not very religious, just wants to hang out and have a few drinks and listen to music, and rarely want to even get anywhere near politics/religion discussions- but MANY families are not like that.
I can definitely understand plenty of people not wanting to feel obligated to spend uncomfortable time with family which the holidays becomes for some- or feel obligated at all, even if it would be a good time. The social expectation itself feels gross to me so I understand it purely on that level too.
That said, I'm not implying OP should do this- they know their situation far better than I.
Ah, yes, I have certainly considered that! I make an effort to see my family and friends throughout the year, so these (holidays) very few days a year are fine to miss.
Ok, but why not make the effort to just visit them when Christmas happens to be going on, unrelated to Christmas, if it'd make your family happy?
Because there are two sides to every relationship, and doing so would make OP unhappy, and that matters just as much.
What do you mean by this?
What is your favorite song out of the selection of Christmas songs and carols?
Definitely the Josh Groban rendition of O’ Holy Night
I'm Jewish, so I don't celebrate, and never have. It's a bit of a tradition to get Chinese food that day, though.
Raised in the only Jewish family in a very Christian Midwestern U.S. town, so that was our tradition as well.
I don't think Orthodox and Conservative Jews would do this, since pork is a Chinese food staple, but blue laws and Christian custom usually meant that no other restaurants were open on Christmas. Our family was particularly liberal, so we observed Hanukkah, but not kashrut.
Spouse is quietly but vehemently ex-Catholic. No rituals or churching for him.
Some years I still light Hanukkah candles, but didn't this year - it was too fraught for me because of the Gaza war and what would have been my mother's 100th birthday (Yahrzeit).
For the most part, spouse and I are self-sufficient in getting things. We'll buy small gifts for each other if we see something that's perfect, regardless of the date. Otherwise, we spend to make donations in each other's names for the holiday season, and send gift certificates to family.
The only disappointment is that there's no great Chinese food where we live now, so we save up and go to the Vietnamese restaurant's special Tét dinner instead.
Hence the scene in A Christmas Story.
I've met several Orthodox and Conservatives who still eat Chinese on Christmas, but they'll stick to the beef/veg/poultry options.
Since most Chinese cuisine doesn't involve dairy, it's easy to pretend the kitchen doesn't touch other treif, either. My mother was raised in a strictly observant household - though we weren't believers, we never had pork at home. What a joy it was to discover moo shu, barbeque, and bacon...
You would be interested in checking out the Hava Nagrilla contest.
We will, in fact, be making our own Chinese barbequed pork given the long holiday weekend this year.
Peking Duck is our Christmas dinner for similiar reasons. This year we're swapping with New Year's dinner though because there was a killer deal on Prime Rib and we can't wait that long to eat it.
The Internet is world wide.
Why assume that everyone was born into a family that celebrates Christmas?
Because, broadly speaking, English websites tend to be utterly dominated by English-first users, and Christianity is the dominate religion in most English-first countries.
Yes, it's a problem, we try our best here to not lean hard into those biases. But it would be more productive to share what you do this time of year rather than try to shame OP. Most regions do some sort of celebration on solstice, it'd be cool to hear about those.
I did. Before the posting the comment you replied to.
Standing up for what is better is shaming? Your interpretation.
Part of charitable interpretation is to read things in their best possible light. It's a core foundation of this site. Everyone writes in a different way, and nitpicking wording that isn't obviously bad doesn't help anybody.
OP's point obviously came across, nobody seemed to be confused. There's no need to slap some negativity about sub-optimal wording on top of it.
I never celebrated Christmas, simply because it's not even a holiday in my country, we only celebrate New Year
Do I celebrate Christmas? I think maybe no. Nobody wants to decorate our cluttered house and I don't really have any family nearby to visit with either. Beyond that I've never really had friends that I was close with in a way that would make me visit them for their holiday celebration.
I guess in some ways I've got a little bit of bitterness when it comes to Christmas insofar as celebrations go. At one point I begun to realize that the family members we would go visit for it were much better off than my family, and sometimes it would be with my stepmother's family whom I didn't even know. In retrospect it makes me feel like I was something of a mooch. And even though Christmas presents were always a great thing, it would sometimes just serve to demonstrate what we didn't have.
I think next year I'll probably set some time out so that I can go and visit my sister the next state over for Christmas.
My family celebrates christmas, but unless I'm living with someone that wants to, I just don't care about it. It started when I was around 12. The consumerism of it all is gross and I refuse to feed into it.
I don't really understand why Christmas has to mean consumerism? Isn't this up to what you make of it? I think of it as an excuse to enjoy time with friends and relatives.
It’s weird because the theme of nearly every Christmas movie, book, sermon, etc is “Christmas has became me too commercialized, but our heroes eventually discover the real meaning.” Is Christmas dripping with consumerism? Or do we inject a villain and dress it up with drama to reassure ourselves that our celebrations are better than everybody else’s.
(I don’t mean this to dismiss your view, more to criticize people like myself who do celebrate it and construct a narrative while doing so)
it is... and you see it more once you're out of it. The story for the movies about the 'true meaning' of Christmas is nice, but not universal.
I don’t ever want to make light of anyone’s loss, but something about the phrasing here tickled my brain in a really delightful way. I think I might start adding “who are still alive” to all kinds of discussions around who I spend time with.
You will find yourself saying it often as you get older unless you come from a really large family.
Value the people you have, now.
Muslim here so never really celebrated growing up, however, my Muslim family has adopted a tradition of a family meal for Christmas since that's one of the few days when everyone is off. So, I take part in Christmas by having a big family dinner on Christmas. We also do one of those "adopt a family" where you can buy stuff for a local family in need. My mother works in the healthcare field and every year they have a tree at her hospital with a card with family's name and a short list of things they need/want for Christmas. Every year we pick a family and buy their gifts.
As the family has grown, some of us have gotten married to non Muslims and our annual Christmas dinner actually has some Christians.
Like a few others in this thread, my family never celebrated Christmas either, despite being in America and considering ouevselves American. My family comes from a culture where it's not part of our holidays so we don't celebrate it. We instead just use the time off to relax or travel. My family is the same with Thanksgiving too. We are very thankful for what we have but we are able to meet up as an extended family throughout the year so we just use the November week as another holiday too.
I'm not religious, so I never celebrated it. My family is not religious either.
On Christmas (or Christmas Eve, depending on which day they fall on), I have dinner with my dad where he makes traditional dishes from the region he grew up in. When I was a kid, we'd do this for New Year's, but now that us kids are all grown and going to different New Year events, Christmas is the closest convenient holiday.
I guess it might depend on your definition of "celebrating Christmas". My wife and I do some mild decorating - it's kind of a cozy feel that we enjoy. But we don't really go anywhere and we don't buy one another gifts for Christmas. We tend to buy one another gifts whenever the mood strikes. My family is pretty big on Christmas, and it genuinely upset my mother for a few years when I first explained to her I just wasn't interested anymore. This is only exacerbated since my family became "born again" around 2006 and grew exceptionally religious.
I think I was about 24 or 25. Around 2014/2015. However, I'd been growing frustrated with the holiday starting in 2012.
I'm an agnostic atheist, so the religious aspects have no meaning to me. I actually like Christmas insofar as a few classical movies, extra cookies, the push to be kind to one another, and spending time with those you care about. But most of all, I can't stand the blatant propaganda to consume needlessly and buy nonsense gifts because you feel obligated to. This especially rubbed me the wrong way right out of college when I was completely broke. I don't like feeling forced to buy people things. I can say without a doubt that Christmas contributed significantly to the ruin my parents' financial stability over the course of the average year. I don't want gifts and I don't want to buy junk for people that gets thrown out a year later, I just want to spend time with folks or be left alone.
None of my friends care. My mother literally wept over the phone during the first two years. But I think they've slowly grown to accept it. I even convinced my mother to dial down the gift-giving as they get older and should take greater care with their finances. I'm still a godless heathen in their eyes, though.
Sleep in. Eat too much. Spend time with the wife. Sometimes we have brunch or dinner with friends where we all pitch in. Drink too much eggnog. It's a relatively low stress time, which is weird to this day for me. The holidays were always horribly stressful when I was growing up. Tons of travel, not enough money, too many gifts, etc.
I stopped celebrating when I first moved out into my own place, and stopped giving and accepting gifts a couple of years after that. (I do gifts again now, but only for people for whom I have an actively good gift idea; if nothing immediately comes to mind, I give them nothing. Either way, I expect nothing, and make sure this is very clear to anyone who might consider it. This is the only part I participate in.)
I simply do not care. There isn't anything there that appeals to me. The religious parts are irrelevant because I'm an atheist. The family parts are irrelevant because I barely talk to my family. I'm trying spending time with my partner's family this year to see if it gets any better after recent mental health breakthroughs (last time I was here I had a breakdown and hid in a dark room for several hours), and so far it's mostly ugh; I don't like most of these people either. A few of them are fine. I'd love to hang out with just them without having random old people with no boundaries constantly trying to hug me and start conversations with me. But that isn't what these people do for Christmas.
As for gifts, I stopped after getting several bad gifts in a row that were clearly inspired by either "I like X and therefore @em-dash will also like X" or "@em-dash is into X, I will get her a thing that seems related to X, knowing nothing about X myself and having done minimal research". I became convinced that gift-givers, at least the ones in my life, were doing it solely for the warm fuzzy feelings for themselves, and didn't really care about me.
With my family, it was wrapped up in otherwise not spending any time with them, nothing special related to holidays. They're not happy about it. I hope they find peace in a way that does not involve me.
My friends accept that I'm weird, and I love that. Some of them tried for years to give me things, but finally accepted it. One started giving me baked goods every year, after I admitted that this cleverly bypassed all the reasons I gave for not participating.
Nothing, generally. Since I'd already cut all the Christmas-specific parts out of Christmas, anything else would just be relabeling the same non-celebration.
I stopped celebrating Christmas as a child even if I was dragged to Christmas things by family.
In my early 20s I thought Grav-Mass was a good alternative, but now that I have a family we just do Chinese food on Christmas Day and have a New Year’s tree and small gifts on New Year’s Day.