Can you be an atheist and revel in Christmas? Yule bet!

I am an atheist. Some people – frequently agnostics – think that atheists are arrogant, because they’ve shut the door to the possibility of a creator. I certainly haven’t shut the door, because I don’t know whether or not there is a god, I simply believe there isn’t.

There is a difference between knowledge and belief; we only believe something when the fact of the matter is inaccessible to us and therefore unknowable. I don’t believe that I have one brother. I know it. His name is Damien and he dresses a lot better than I do. I don’t know that there isn’t a theistic creator of the universe, I just believe it. Even if there is a god, why would it bother itself with any of the stringent operating rules of the major religions?

Arsing about watching us from above, like a glorified ant farm, inventorying who is interlocking their moister parts with whom, or ignoring (or creating) natural disasters while rewarding those who cover their ankles or avoid wearing that most forbidden combination of linen and wool.

God making hot dogs

If there is a god, there’s every chance he is a deistic one, who created the universe and then summarily fecked off to get on with the business of pondering whether he could make a hot dog so large that even he himself couldn’t eat it. Such an entity so fundamentally incomprehensible to human intellect is best left to its own devices.

I am, however, possibly a hypocrite, because I'm excited about Christmas. Its aromas and its downtime and its excesses. The chance to watch All About Eve on TV while toasting my besocked feet sweatily beside a vigorous fire. The opportunity to hug the people I care about, and listen to updates about their lives expressed via a liberally sprayed mouthful of partially masticated mince pie all over the rug I just vacuumed in honour of their visit.

It is a wonderful time to appreciate and resent your family, and to feel constructively sad together about the people who aren’t there (for whatever reason), to overeat and exchange gifts.

Christmas is a recharging of the batteries which fuel the rest of the exciting, dull, joyful and melancholy year. It is a time to stop and check in with yourself, a time of retrospection and casting your gaze into the future. Online dating sites have their highest engagement of the year after Christmas. People leave jobs and partners they aren’t satisfied with, and begin again. This is why Christmas is important, and why you don’t need to be Christian, or even religious, to benefit from it.

Pathological adoration of fairy lights

I mean, I’m not really a hypocrite. Christmas is only considered Christian because the holiday is the most historically recent iteration of what were originally pagan winter celebrations subsumed by the church.

The tradition of a winter feast day is hardly peculiar to Christianity, and even the Christmas tree only made it to this part of the world in the Victorian era, being German in origin. It isn’t a particular hallmark of Christian celebration. In fact, Druids rather liked using evergreen trees for symbolic purposes, and I can’t see that they were at all offended by Christians borrowing the concept.

Religions, like everything else, are in large part a composite of ideas and traditions that existed before their inception. For these reasons, and a pathological adoration of fairy lights, I feel quite entitled to keep a sparkly tree in my home without accepting that an all-powerful patriarch created the universe and polices its function and morality.

So of course you can be an atheist and revel in the sublime wonders of Christmas. You could call it something else if you want to avoid Christian connotations, but “secu-mas” and “super-fun-great-winter-holiday” are a bit more awkward to say.

It is a winter festival that breaks the back of the darkest part of the year and encourages mental stock-taking and valuing loved ones. That’s not to say that Christmas can’t be painful, lonely, and grindingly sad sometimes. My last one was pretty rough and we can all point to several like that.

Christmas, like everything anticipated, has highs and lows, but it is an oasis of fairy lights and gravy in a frozen winter desert. God knows we all need that.