Of all the treasures that came out of the cardboard box of Christmas decorations every December of my childhood, the nativity set was the best. Joseph, Mary, the kings, the shepherds: Our tiny figures were made of clay with a white glaze that looked like icing. I treated them like delicate, special dolls, rearranging them and moving them around the living room, from the coffee table to the stereo console, to the mantle. I might add a blanket for the baby, sometimes a scarf for Mary, cut from scraps of velvet or felt.
These are experiences that my own children, who are now 21 and 25, never had. Their father and I are atheists who, without debate, raised them entirely without religion. At Christmas, we still did the tree and the lights and the presents—all the secular parts of the holiday—and my kids knew the Christmas story, the way they knew about Greek myths. But there were no religious symbols in our home, and no going to church. In recent years, I’ve begun to regret this.
Perhaps it was inevitable. After all, despite the nativity set, my upbringing in the ’70s, on the outskirts of New York City, was more groovy and activist than Christian. My family went to protest marches, not Sunday service. My mother balked at any kind of authoritarianism or rules and didn’t believe religion was necessary for shaping and raising children. We rarely went to church, and certainly not at Christmas—unless we were at my grandmother’s house, in which case we might go to the Christmas Eve service, at her behest. If I was moved by the music in her stately Episcopal church, as a teenager I bristled at the conservative sermons her minister gave. There was too much talk about kneeling and bowing to our Lord Father for my emerging feminism.
My fellow Gen Xers balked at these traditions, too. Our youth culture questioned everything and routinely dismissed the various—as we learned to call them—industrial complexes. The Christmas Industrial Complex was no exception. In fact, the holiday was the mother lode of problems, a bonanza of both capitalist propaganda and religious dogma.
The trouble was, I still loved Christmas.
My first winter after college, I was living in Montana. I was homesick and didn’t have enough money to fly back to the East Coast for Christmas with my family. But I wanted to celebrate. My ski-bum boyfriend and our environmentalist roommates winced at the idea of a tree. (“You want to go kill a tree just so you can celebrate some dude’s birthday who didn’t even exist?”) I was relieved when someone told me about a forest-management approach: By cutting down a tree that’s crowding out other trees, you could actually assist the forest growth. My boyfriend and I trekked out to the woods and felled a lopsided five-foot spruce and dragged it back to the house. I baked cookies for ornaments instead of buying shiny tinsel that would only end up in the landfill. That year, I just about managed to navigate my anxiety about Christmas.
And then I became a mom.
By that point, I had broken up with the ski-bum boyfriend, headed back East, and met the man who is now my husband. When I became pregnant with our first child, the Christmas dilemma reared its head again. Families are like new sovereign nations: an empty landscape waiting to be filled with rituals and traditions. Ours was especially empty. We weren’t even sure we wanted to be officially married, having both been raised in families wracked by divorce. Neither of us had grown up going to church regularly, and we were both atheists. Would we celebrate Christmas? Why? How? I realized I wanted our child to experience the same feelings of wonder and delight I remembered from my Christmases. But that God and Jesus wouldn’t be a part of it wasn’t even a question.
A mom-friend and I discussed the Christmas dilemma while pushing our toddlers in strollers through the streets of Brooklyn. It was our first holiday season as parents. She and her boyfriend, a convert to Buddhism, were skeptical of the holiday. It was early December but already many of the brownstone front yards were festooned with glowing, life-size plastic statues of the nativity, garish tinsel, and blinking lights. Even as we rolled our eyes at the gaudy decorations, I had to confess my decision.
“We’re getting a tree,” I admitted. My friend was surprised. “You’re celebrating Christmas?” she asked. “With Jesus?”
“Not with Jesus,” I said, a little defensively. “No church. Just the tree. And some of the fun things. Like presents.”
Excising the Christianity didn’t seem like a problem: There were other ways to celebrate miracles and joy, most of them perfect for children. The cookies, the gingerbread houses, the trees, the lights. The lights were especially important! As we saw it, the holiday’s origins lay not in the birth of Jesus but in the solstice, an ancient celebration of humans lighting candles and fires to keep the darkness at bay in this darkest moment of the year.
But right away, there were problems with secular Christmas, and they got worse every year.
Santa Claus, for example. If you’ve decided to raise your children without God because you are into truth and reason and rationality, are you going to tell them that Santa Claus is real? And refuse to budge even when your kids become stout little rationalists demanding answers? I thought it was bizarre to lie to your children, but by the time they started asking difficult questions, we were committed to Christmas. We went half in on the Santa delusion, referring to Santa with a wink.
The problem with presents was worse and ever-worsening. I love presents. I love buying gifts and wrapping them and hiding them in secret places. I love the sight of a Christmas tree surrounded by presents. I love Christmas morning, sitting around in pajamas opening all the gifts. And when the kids were still little it was simple: Fill a stocking with a few chocolates and trinkets and wrap up some presents. Preschoolers are easy to impress. They like boxes more than anything else. (“Mom!” my 4-year-old daughter stage-whispered to me one Christmas morning, having peeked under the tree. “He brought clementines!”) But older kids always want more. By middle school my daughter had graduated to texting me an extensive shopping list with links. She once told me that her friends’ parents spend $1000 on each child. It made me wonder whether I should give up on presents completely.
For parents, the holiday is a constant pursuit of wonder. We want that awe-filled gasp as the child glimpses the tree on Christmas morning, or finds the cookie crumbs that Santa left, or opens the long-awaited gift. We want to tumble from the cold darkness into warm, glowing parties where we are plied with food and drinks. We want miracles and transformations; who doesn’t? But where religion once guided a community through the holiday, bringing neighbors together and filling long nights with beauty, making Christmas meaningful in an atheist family can be hard and sometimes lonely work. The memes that begin to proliferate in November about mothers preparing for the mental exertion of Christmas quickly give way to endless reels about Christmas crafting and staging and elaborate Elf on the Shelf antics.
I actually love watching these reels, just as I continue to love the secular traditions. My house is mostly decorated, and we’ll be building gingerbread houses as usual this year. I’ll make that last shopping trip a few days before Christmas, and I suspect I’ll feel the same old nostalgic excitement in the noisy, glittering mall. But through it all I’ll be fending off the looming notion that it’s not enough. I’ll be searching for meaning in these traditions, hoping to surprise and delight my family. And through it all I’ll be thinking, maybe it doesn’t have to be this hard. Maybe we didn’t have to reject every aspect of the religious traditions.
I’m sure my kids would have had complaints about church on Christmas Eve. I’m sure I would have too. I can imagine sitting in a pew silently grumbling about the minister’s call for obedience. My husband might have sighed pointedly when the man behind us sang too loudly. It wouldn’t have been perfect. But lately I can’t get those services at my grandmother's church out of my mind. Even as a teenager it was impossible not to be moved by the sight of the familiar building at night, dressed up in garlands and ribbons, the stained glass windows in dark shadows, the altar flickering with candlelight, everyone in velvet dresses or ties or even suits. I remember the voices of the choir vibrating in my chest and the feeling of something very big and old and special.
My generation had the best of both worlds. We played in the crumbling remains of Christian traditions without realizing how much structure and beauty they gave us. I’m still an atheist, but I’ve come to believe that taking religion out of my children’s Christmas was a mistake. They never really witnessed the celebration of a miracle that goes back two thousand years. They didn’t have a nativity set, even though I loved mine, because when you scrub God from your holiday celebration, it’s strange to give your kids a tiny baby Jesus to play with. Isn’t it?
I’m not sure anymore. I couldn’t pass on to my kids a faith in God, but I could have shared the traditions that have always shaped and enchanted childhoods in this part of the world. The remnants were still there, and they were good. To today’s young atheist families building their annual rituals, I offer this advice: It’s okay if you don’t believe in God. Go to the Christmas Eve service anyway. Learn the carols, even the religious ones. Get the nativity set.
For more Christmastime reflections, click here to read Tara Isabella Burton’s piece, “How to Give a Real Gift.”