Looking through the lens of my new secular viewpoint, I stopped to think about the meaning of the holidays -- why should I continue to celebrate them? What do they actually mean to me?
The winter holidays are a celebration of death and of life, of ending and of beginning, and ultimately, of hope.
Winter is a time when snow blankets the life of the land, when only pine and fir trees show the promise of spring in their enduring green. The end of the year is near, all is quiet. Winter is a time of waiting.
We wait for spring, for the earth to renew itself, for plants to bud, for the world to grow green with new life.
This is why the peoples of old celebrated it. Winter is a time of hardship, of scarcity, but the coming sun, the coming growth, the coming rebirth holds hope for us, hope for plenty, for a better life.
This is likely why winter was chosen for Jesus' birthdate. The Christ child holds the same hope -- hope that we can be redeemed, that we can be forgiven for our past mistakes and wrongdoing. That we can start anew with the world, and be better people, cleared of past sin.
The holidays to me are a chance to reaffirm the bonds of family and friendship, to meditate on the hope that the world will be better in the coming year. We hope that we will be washed clean from the travails of the previous year in preparation for a better one.
We show our dedication to this goodness through the giving of gifts, the sharing of song, of wine, of warmth and good food. We try to touch all those that are far away, that we haven't contacted in a while.
Hope. A time of reaffirming our dedication to a better world, to being better people. That's what Christmas means to me.
What Christmas Means to Me
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What Christmas means to me
I don't look at the winter holidays as a celebration of death and of life, more of a hibernation, when you talk of life and death you remind us of our own mortality, something the religious use religiously to keep us under their thumbs,,, nothing really dies because of the winter, the trees are still alive, the clouds and the air are still here, the snow only covers the northern half of the country, it doesn't kill the root/seeds of the foliage, nor the fish under the ice, it's not like a glacier is coming through every year, and I don't think the peoples of old celebrated it, as a matter of fact, Holloween originally was a ritual to scare off the coming cold weather, and I recently read that winter had nothing to do with jesus' birthday (I'll have to dig that one up to give you the details) it has to do with a specific event in a country that doesn't see any snow except in the mountains,,, Although very poetic, your blog is showing us the very "human" need of familiarity, of family and friends, on an mutually agreed day off work, under the "guise" of a religious holiday.