zoekrupka.com

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Despite the predicted end of civilisation as we know it and the so-called “atheist war on Christmas” hailed by American Republicans and fundamentalist Christians the world over, Christmas appears to be scheduled for 25 December nonetheless.

Atheists on the whole seem quite taken with Christmas. Alain de Botton, author of the recent book Religion For Atheists, will be celebrating with his kids this year in front of a festive cactus, Wendy Squires would like to keep the good stuff from the holiday season, and even Richard Dawkins will indulge, turkey, carols and all . On the whole, if the atheist adverts in Times Square are anything to go by, atheists are worried about being labelled as scrooges and concerned that we’re aware that they’re happy to keep Santa but not so keen on Jesus.

In my father’s home country of Czechoslovakia, Santa is a fairly recent phenomenon. Czech Christmases tended to be intimate affairs, with presents brought by Jezisek, the baby Jesus. In the centuries old fight over the meaning of Christmas, Santa often gets a bad rap. Criticised as a pagan goblin, or the symbol of commercialism, in the war on Christmas the fat man in the red suit has been placed in the opposite corner of the ring to the long-suffering Jesus.

While there have been many attempts to find a “god gene”, our desire to believe in something divine largely without evidence remains a mystery. While many atheists cite anthropological and evolutionary explanations for our continuing need for faith in a power greater than ourselves, at least part of the truth is that the desire to celebrate Christmas as non-believers is personal.

The current arguments over Christmas aren’t simply about ideology. The fact that every year we talk more and more about the right to publicly celebrate, dump or salvage Christmas, and the erosion of the Christian traditions marking the birth of Jesus, reveals an internal struggle that we have conveniently projected onto the vast blank canvas of the holiday season. In many ways that’s what makes our discussions so compelling.

Christmas is not simply an expression of our collective need for mythology, community or spiritual experience; it’s also a holiday about family. And in the war on Christmas as in many other areas, fundamentalist Christians have colonised the family. They’ve taken Jesus, Mary and Joseph and left the rest of the world with Santa Claus.

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