A Variety of Ways Not to Have Christmas

It's a holiday from work and school. It's wrapping paper torn and scattered about the tree. For the fortunate, it's a family dinner with good food and minimal drama. But for two groups of people in particular, Christmas is a time to feel like a minority.



First, there are those Christians committed to resisting the holiday's materialism; second, there are those who do not celebrate Christmas at all. This week I asked members of both groups what their Christmases would be like. Here is a sampling of what they said:



Rod Dreher of Philadelphia, author of "Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots" and a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church: "Orthodoxy preserves the older Christian understanding of the weeks leading up to Christmas as a time of penance, like Lent before Easter. You can imagine how difficult this is to pull off when everybody else is chowing down on holiday party food.



"But Orthodoxy insists that if the fast is only about abstaining from food, it's meaningless. You also have to abstain from anger, and everything that separates you from God. I've been working on my temper during this Nativity fast season, on trusting God's providence in difficult situations and on learning how to see God in everyone. It's hard — but that's the point, isn't it?"



David Silverman of Cranford, N.J., president of American Atheists: "On Christmas, I hide under the table and sit in a fetal position. No, that's not true. I don't celebrate it. My wife is Jewish by religion, so we have a mixed marriage. My daughter, who's 13, is an atheist 357 days of the year, and the other 8 days, she is a Jew. She doesn't hide that at all.



"I never celebrate Christmas. The one thing I do is I go to my friends' parties. If they have a Christmas party I am all there."



Heidi Miller Yoder, an assistant professor of religion at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va.: "Some Mennonites have been very intentional about spending no more than $100 on Christmas gifts. It's a movement not only within the Mennonite Church but within the larger Christian church.



"Other families have deliberately said, 'We will only do homemade gifts.' In my extended family, we donate gifts instead, and for the children, we do give them some gifts, realizing that it's adults who distinguish between needs and wants, and they are learning to do that."



David Semonian, who works at the Jehovah's Witnesses' world headquarters, in Brooklyn Heights: "We don't celebrate Christmas, and the primary reason is because the Bible doesn't direct us to do so. Jesus commanded us to commemorate his death, and not his birth. We have the day off, and enjoy getting together with our families and children, but it wouldn't be a time of giving gifts or any implication we are celebrating the holiday."



Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit seminarian and the author of "The Sojourn," a novel to be published in May: "I grew up in a house where, early on, there was almost as much Slovak as English spoken, the Christmas Eve dinner of fish, soup, and oplatki wafers (and a bit of brandy, of course) seemed almost more important than Christmas Day itself. No doubt because it was a gathering of family without all the trappings of Christmas Day, but maybe, too, because it led right into Mass at midnight.



"So I do the best I can to approximate my grandmother's and my mother's old menu, and somehow we always manage to have more than ourselves around the table, which is nice.



"And while it's hard now to get to midnight Mass with three kids under 5, if someone's willing to baby-sit, my wife and I slip out to church still, and come back with only a few hours before the whole house wakes up, but satisfied in a simple way that Christmas remains for us a season of holy days."



Janet Gyatso, professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School: "I grew up Jewish, and my own practice is a mix of Judaism and Buddhism and being a critical intellectual and not identifying with the practice of any of it, per se. But Buddhism teaches one to be as generous and open-minded as possible. Any remaining feelings of being excluded from Christmas as a kid have simply vanished for me as an adult. One just takes pleasure from it all."



Angel Falcon, a student at Rutgers School of Law in Newark and a practitioner of Palo Mayombe, a traditional Afro-Cuban religion: "I don't take offense when people say, 'Merry Christmas.' When you're Latino, Christmas and Jesus play an important role even if you're not Christian. I like to say that Jesus and I don't have a problem. His crew can be a little annoying, but he's fine."


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