Serving Up Christmas

I am not a Christian.  I do not belong or adhere to any particular set of religious beliefs.  Rather, as I have written on this blog, I found spiritual peace when I came to the conclusion that I neither believe nor disbelieve in God (or, for that matter, any particular religious perspective).  So, Christmas does not have particular meaning for me as a celebration of the birth of the son of God and the various significances that go with that.  Still, there would seem to be much of worth in the philosophies associated with Jesus, and so, as I have been contemplating that this year, I have come to the view that celebrating Christmas as a means of commemorating and reflecting upon those philosophies may have value.  That value, though, would seem to call for celebration of Christmas in a very different way than how so many of us currently celebrate it, and for that I'd like to contextualize it within other views of holidays that I have developed in recent years.

As I have indicated on this blog, I think we should rearrange some of the meanings we currently associate with winter holidays.  Thanksgiving should be removed, as it and its mythology of oppression have little meaning, or it should be changed to a National Day of Mourning.  I think the day of thanks that many now observe on Thanksgiving should be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  A day celebrating those who have worked and sacrificed in the name of civil rights seems much more appropriate as a time at which to be thankful.  The day of giving gifts that we now celebrate on Christmas should be moved to New Year's Eve/Day. The time when we both look back at the past year and look forward to the next year seems like the appropriate time for gift giving and merriness.

Christmas, then, in this reconfiguration, would take over for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a day of service.  There certainly are good reasons to associate Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil rights with the theme of service, so it's not that I'm opposed to that connection (though there may be some problematic racial coding occurring when the concept of "service" is associated with the holiday that is most prominently associated with the contributions of racial and ethnic minorities).  It seems, though, that that holiday is much more appropriately themed as a time of thanks.  Meanwhile, the messages offered by Jesus seem to align so squarely with the concept of service and seem to have their most use to both Christians and non-Christians as they are associated with service that I think, at least insofar as we might wish to maintain Christmas as a holiday, we ought to make it the day of service.

With that in mind, I am making plans this Christmas to increase my forms of service this coming year, and I resolve each Christmas Day and/or Eve going forward to spend a few hours volunteering in some form of service capacity.  That seems so much more deeply in line with my understandings of Jesus than anything else I might do that day.