The Santa (Get Out) Clause

Okay. Christmas. Now, as I quite famously do not believe in God (or ghosts or anything of that nature, despite my love of the horror genre) how do I approach Christmas? It is after all the most sacred holiday in the Christian calendar. Hell, it's the only day of the year that the newsagents I work at closes. The only day. We don't close for Hannukah or Passover or Ramadan - we don't even acknowledge their existence. In fact, by opening on a Saturday, you could say that we are actually mocking the Jewish faith. The only thing that stops it being a big fuck you to Eddie Moskowicz and all his Rabbi pals is that we defy the Christian church by opening on a Sunday as well, and not just for the state suggested times of six hours. No. The only concession we get to respect God is that we close half an hour earlier than during the week. We still open at five in the morning and close at half ten at night. Seventeen and a half hours of God-mocking business.

Now, as I said before, I don't believe in God. I'm not even agnostic. I'm an atheist, through and though, and it isn't an easy belief to hold (coming soon, a discussion of how atheism is a belief and not just a lack of belief). People of the religious persuasion have all the fun of the afterlife to look forward to. Or reincarnation. Or something, whatever. The point is that pretty much every religion holds that death is not the end. When you shuffle off this mortal coil, there's something beyond that. Be it heaven, hell, reincarnation as a goat, Nirvana, whatever. Not believing in God, we lonely, unloved atheists have no choice to believe that once you die, that's it. Finito. It's not an easy thing to think because as human beings, we're so aware of our own selves and our own minds that it's extremely difficult to consider that one day that's it. No more me. There's this very solid notion that somehow the consciousness muct live on. Well, I call it consciousness, religious folk would probably call it the soul - it amounts to the same thing. It's who you are. The essence of your being. The only real difference is that my view of the consciousness is defined primarily through experiences and emotions - memories, essentially, while I'm sure that some, the Catholic church in particualar, would probably like to think of the soul as something that doesn't really change throughout life, tainted only by sin. I could go off on one about Catholicism and its notions of sin and absolution, but I won't. It's a far bigger can of worms than I am prepared to open today.

Strictly speaking, in a purely scientific term, we do continue on after death. One of the first things we learned in GCSE Science was that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Once you get past the mind-boggling notion that the energy we are now expending has existed since the Big Bang (and before, if you subscribe to the theory that this universe is simply the latest in a long line of universes that explode outward at birth then contract together, creating another huge explosion which births the next universe - but quite frankly, I have enough trouble comprehending the numbers that our own universe generates without adding an infinite number of previous universes into the equation) and that energy will simply be endlessly transferred around until the end of time, you arrive at the epiphany that once you die, your body's energy doesn't simply go 'phht', it is transferred to other things. If you get buried, you become fertiliser, feeding the grass and the trees, which in turn feeds animals and so on and so forth. You get cremated (my own personal choice - I'm not keen on the idea of being buried, even if I am dead by that point and so past caring, it's the notion that what was once me will be just left to rot in the ground and it isn't a fun thought) and you become heat and light and sound. There's a poetry to that which I don't think a religous person would really appreciate.

So where was I? Ah yes. Britain is a Christian country. Forget the ramblings of the right wing fascist papers like the Daily Mail with their Conservative fears that the country is going to be overrun with asylum seekers and racist rants about Johnny Foreigner taking all the hard working white man's jobs (another subject not to get me started on, this) there is no way Britain will ever be anything other than a Christian country. Same with America. There's a reason we have a special Christmas edition of the Radio Times and shops like mine close for Christmas Day and no other. Sure, there are other communities within Britain, but they are in the minority and, like most minorities, generally ignored, left alone to get on with their own business on their own time. A shop which closed for Hannukah would get a lot of comment except in perhaps the orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Gateshead and the like.

And so I celebrate Christmas. Does this make me a hypocrite? Well, strictly speaking, yes. I am one hell of a hypocrite for celebrating Christmas and not actually believing in God or that Jesus Christ was our Saviour. But just as firmly, I am not, because Christmas today as we celebrate it doesn't have much to do with the birth of Christ at all, just as Easter these days is more about chocolate eggs and a giant pink bunny than some guy getting strung up on a cross and having his guts spilled by a Roman Centurion named Longinus. Because, in this day and age, we only want to commemorate happy things. Bad things are generally pushed to one side or remembered only briefly. A one minute silence out of respect for the victims of 9/11, a parade and a one minute silence for Remembrance Day. We had poppies in the shop for Remembrance Day and a whole bunch of kids came in getting them. I don't think they knew what they were for. To them it was probably just some cheap gimmick. Likewise, Christmas isn't about the birth of someone some two thousand years ago in a country halfway round the world. No. Christmas is about toys and snow and time off school if you're a kid. If you're an adult, it's about food and drinking and falling asleep in front of a James Bond movie on Christmas afternoon. All the pledges and homilies that are paraded out at this time of year, all that goodwill to all men crap - well, why don't we be nice to each other all year round? Isn't that what the Bible teaches us? Because, yes, I was brought up in a fairly informally religious community. We got taught Bible stories at school and sangs hymns. At Christmas we went up to the local church and sang carols. It wasn't really until secondary school that we were even explicity told that there were other religions, but even then, there was an implicit implication that they were 'other religions' and Christianity was the default.

So, were I to not celebrate Christmas, I would probably get a lot of strange looks, especially in the shop where I work as lately the big questions seems to have been, "Are you all set for Christmas?" Out of a sense of mischief I really wanted to reply to some people with some witticism along the lines of, "No, actually. I am Jewish and we don't celebrate Christmas." But such is the assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas and the generally low tolerance for sarcasm where I work that such a comment would probably not go over very well.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is tradition and peer pressure. Tradition because Christmas is something that we've always done - my mother is still fairly religious - and peer pressure because it's just what everyone else is doing. But bear this in mind: Next year my sister is getting married. Now, my sister is an atheist like me, although she probably doesn't analyse her belief in the non-existence of God in the way I do. But she's not getting married in a church. I asked her about this when they first chose the place they're getting married and tying the knot in a church never even crossed their minds. It's probably a good thing. Two of my friends got married in a church in June and I felt extremely weird about being in a place of worship. It probably didn't help that it was the same church we used to go to for carol services when we were at school which was somehwere I hadn't been since I was fourteen, so, coupled with the whole non-belief in God, I had a whole bunch of childhood related issues to deal with.

On a sidenote, I recently mentioned my atheism in passing to my boss. I have to stress the 'in passing' part of it because otherwise it makes me look like a nutjob who wanders rounds telling people about my beliefs and people like that really piss me off. Anyway, she (that is, my boss) said she did believe in God and asked me why I didn't. I admitted that I used to, back when I was young and then I had a whole agnostic period in my teens and early twenties and had only recently come to the conclusion that God either doesn't exist or that he's a sadistic son of a bitch and to be honest, as with my own father, I prefer to believe that he doesn't exist than believe that he does but he just doesn't give a shit. Because my life is generally not fun. It's a hard slog and things that seem to come so easily to other people are like getting blood from a stone for me, and if there's anything that all those RE lessons in junior school taught me (and say what you like about the Bible, from a point of view of being a moral guidebook it's fairly solid, just don't get me started on the plot) it's that if you live a decent life and are good to other people then you can't go far wrong and that's just not my life. For no good reason, I was bullied pretty badly for fourteen years of my life, so much so that I still suffer the psychological scars to this day and I used to justify it by thinking that, come adulthood, I would be the success and the bullies would be the ones who were miserable and unhappy. At the time, it seemed like a good deal. But it didn't work out like that. I'm constantly on the lookout for signs that my life is getting better, even just to the point where it doesn't actively suck all the time, but I just can't see them.

Peace out.