I mean, it's a season. but why tho. why this. (I know why.)
Xmas enjoyers will not enjoy this.
The reason even completely secular songs like "Jingle Bells" are so tied in with ""Christmas"" that non-Christians avoiding Christmas won't sing them is because the bloated monstrosity that is ""Christmas"" has colonized the entire fucking season. Western monocultures don't freak out like this for this long over spring or summer, and while they kind of do it over fall, autumn doesn't have a frickin' soundtrack. A lot of fervent Christmas celebrators in the west, particularly non-Christian ones, don't always understand that, the depth of just how fucking bad it is and how even their "secular" way of…doing the exact same things Christians celebrating Christmas do only they don't say "god"…just makes the monoculture problem worse.
If you don't celebrate Christmas, I'm not saying "don't take advantage of the monoculturally mandated time off to spend time with your loved ones". After all, most of us don't get nearly as much time to spend with them during the holidays that do matter that much to us, why deprive ourselves of that solidarity? That just makes us more vulnerable and does absolutely nothing to the monoculture.
Now, I know there are a lot of people who care deeply about their family traditions of the holiday and also people from non-Western cultures who celebrate it both religiously (lookin at you, the Philippines) and secularly (Japan and while I don't agree with the way they do it I do find it hilarious, like they are fully doing what conservatives whine that Christmas is becoming here (separating it from its christian roots) yet I bet conservatives would love it there because that shit is everywhere). That doesn't mean you can't explore ways to feed your spirit of nostalgia without continuing to alienate non-Christmas (for whatever reason) people. Also, perhaps consider that maybe just because you've always done a thing and you love it doesn't mean that thing needs to be done in perpetuity. There's something very obnoxious about an 11-month ally who spends December blatantly showing off how performative the rest of the year is to them.
I'm not saying "don't celebrate it if it means a lot to you," but a lot of y'all aren't just quietly celebrating at home, you're out here blasting Christmas music in shared spaces, stringing lights around handrails (an accessibility hazard by the way), strewing garlands everywhere and calling it "neutral" because you say "Merry—oops, I mean 'happy holidays!'" It's not neutral, stop pretending it is. Like, if you are steadfast against continuing to perpetrate the harms of the Christian monoculture, maybe you should not be the ones having a giant lighting display war with the neighbors. I've never heard of any other position having a "cheat month."
idk, I guess what I'm really saying is, celebrate if you want, decorate if you want, whatever whatever, I can't and won't take that from you. But maybe then just stop pretending that you care about bringing down the monoculture, because you don't. And that's not an attack. It just is what it is.
Obviously Christians who celebrate Christmas are already a part of the monoculture no matter what they do, so there's no reason for me to address them here. I'm not villainizing them, to be clear (and I'm certainly not lionizing them), I'm simply saying that they have nothing to gain from this topic. "Don't be obnoxious about Christmas if you're not Christian while saying you care about bringing down Christian monoculturalism" literally just does not apply to Christians who celebrate Christmas.
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