“Sorry, We Don’t Celebrate Christmas”

How life changes without the celebration of religious holidays

Photo by Yan from Pexels

First off, while religion has much to do with this subject, this article is not about religion itself, but about how one’s life changes when one no longer celebrates religious holidays.

In 1992 I joined the Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ), and we do not celebrate religious holidays. I was 29 at the time and had always celebrated Christmas without fail. Every year (unless I was deployed in the Navy) I’d get that tree and decorate it, and buy what gifts I could afford. When I joined the Church, however, all of a sudden I didn’t do any of that. Instead:

• I no longer had to stress about buying gifts for every family member, or even about buying Christmas cards and forcing myself to write personalized messages for everyone.
• I didn’t have to worry about buying and decorating that doggone tree, just to throw it away a couple weeks later (and cleaning up the mess of pine needles on the floor). I also didn’t have to grab out the ladder and put up lights all over the house, or buy ever-larger decorations to put in our yard to keep up with the decorations put out by our neighbors.
• What’s more, it’s an almost guilty pleasure that, with the hundreds of dollars saved by not going deep in credit-card debt buying gifts and decorations, I still have access to all the Christmas sales.
• An unexpected bonus was that when someone wanted to take Christmas off to spend with their families, it didn’t bother me a bit to take their shifts — more money for me, and they’re grateful for the opportunity to be at home at a time that means so much to them.
• One thing that did not change was my lifelong annoyance at seeing Christmas advertisements as soon as September, and radio stations playing Christmas songs nonstop beginning the day after Halloween.

The same dynamic applies to all other religious holidays such as Easter, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day. Not celebrating them saves so much time and money, and over the years, it’s become easy to see all such holidays in the same light as most Americans would see the Islamic holiday of Eid.