Are there any jellies who don't celebrate any of the religious or cultural holidays this time of year?

Our family isn’t religious but we gather together over the holidays because that’s the rare time some of us have paid/extra days off work. We celebrate the people in our lives and loved ones that are dead.

I don’t celebrate any religious or cultural holidays, and I am an atheist, but that is not the reason I don’t celebrate them. I just don’t celebrate anything because of what day it is. I need a different reason. I’ll celebrate if a close friend has a kid, I’ll celebrate a big business deal, and I’ll celebrate other kinds of achievements.

The main reason is I just find normal holidays always end up boring or predictable. In my mind I think me and my friends will go to a big club to celebrate new year, but in reality we end up waiting around bored at a bus stop, and some idiot will try to bash a bottle over a friends head, and nothing goes to plan.

If I’m going to clelebrate I will say “lets celebrate” or “this called for a celebration” and we will take it from there. It could just be as simple as ordering a bottle of champagne, or we could end up running naked across a closed golf field at night, whatever happens.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything at all, in fact I’m often thankful of avoiding whatever it was I did not like the idea of.

If someone says merry x-mas I’ll say it back, and if I get invited to the house of someone who takes it seriously I’ll bring a gift, But thats just to be polite, and I’ll do it for any religion’s holiday.

I celebrate Christmas with my family (as do most Atheists and Agnostics whom I am friends with), but its purely a secular event: food, family, gifts. There’s no religion involved in the experience at all (not even from those who do believe in a god.) If there had been any religions aspect involved, I would have opted out of the holiday a long time ago.

A good portion of my friends grew up in Buddhist households and do not celebrate any winter holiday until February. I still send them a card wishing them a happy holiday.

Where theirs a party I’m there, one good thing about being an atheist, I can enjoy everyone’s celebrations, If invited….. Not a problem ;-)

I grew up in a Christian household and then married into a Catholic one. I am no longer either of these religions and instead practice a blend of Buddhism/Wiccan/Nature-based/and Native American spirituality. Try as I might to detach myself from Chrisitian holiday’s in preference of observing the Solstices, Equinoxes and cross quarter days I find my family and friends drawing me back into their celebrating even when I am resistant. Sometimes I am annoyed especially at the excessiveness of it all…but I enjoy the social gathering of friends and family. And I don’t feel like I am missing much except avoiding accumulating a lot of needless debt. Woohoo!

I’m a Christian and a devout one (unless that sounds like bragging. I just mean, what I believe, I do believe and have sound intellectual and scientific reason for believing what I believe).

However my perspective on most of the celebration going on is that it secular, profit motivated (and I have nothing against profit..I like it…just not here) and done because it is expected. In those case I show up if invited.

I would much prefer to celebrate a religious event in a church, preferably in the evening. Any celebration beyond that is fine, but its not part of the religion.

We don’t celebrate Christmas at home, as we are also members of the Baha’i Faith.

There are a few Holy Days that we celebrate in November, we get together with family and make a traditional thanksgiving dinner (well, this year we ordered one anyway), we have a number of birthdays in December (including mine) and we celebrate Christmas with my grandmother’s family and in-laws.

All-in-all there is a lot going on for us this time of year.

I encourage my husband and son to make gifts for us to give each other for Christmas at the in-laws. I don’t want us to spend much money on it… but I’m a fan of homemade presents for any occasion!

I grew up Jewish, but I’m an atheist and I think Hannukah is an insane holiday that basically celebrates Taliban-like religious terrorists. So I refuse to celebrate that.

I also don’t have much use for Christmas because, frankly, I don’t give a shit about the birth of a generic late-Roman-era cult leader.

I do celebrate Winter Solstice. I think it’s important to mark the shortest day of the year, and I like certain traditions that have evolved around this day. Originally, Christmas was based on the Saturnalia festival; Saturn was the Roman god of time.

What I like to do on Dec. 21 is light a candle in a dark room and stare at it in silence for exactly one hour. (I set a timer.) The point is to contemplate how long an hour truly is; what it feels like for that amount of time to pass. It’s interesting to observe how my mind inevitably cuts up the hour into cycles or shorter periods, or gets distracted by the movement of the flame. One time there was a tiny little bug that constantly, slowly but surely, walked around the candle and I kept track of how many “orbits” it made.