I grew up a spoiled kid in suburban Staten Island freebasing on sugar, Jesus and Santa Claus. For a boy raised by Italians and Polacks, what other choice was there? Though we didn’t always go to church on Sunday, we did have regular religious instruction to prepare for Communion and Confirmation and other rituals to keep me involved. I even remember my folks hosting religious classes at home for the local kids. A lay person taught the class in my basement. My parents probably used the time to smoke cigarettes and bone upstairs, finally free of my brother and I for an hour. It was 1981. I remember that because the timer on my archaic VCR made a loud clicking sound during class as it began recording The Greatest American Hero.

I have great memories of Christmas. I ate it up, loved every single thing about it. The lights, the music, the animated specials, the religious stories, even midnight mass. Of course my brother and I were spoiled rotten. The gifts under the tree inched into the corners of the room. When I was seven, he and I opened every present under the tree before the family awoke, even theirs to each other. That must have been fun for them.

For years I’d walk slowly through the neighborhood marveling at Christmas lights, eventually driving across Staten Island to see some of the more outlandish ones, Bing Crosby bu-bu-bu-ing away on cassette in my old Mercury Topaz. I had a Jesus bauble in that car staring up at me by the radio controls. I’d make a cross on it with my thumb whenever I passed an ambulance or church, which ultimately gave Jesus a weird black eye. I could see him staring at me whenever I fooled around in the backseat.

Not very long after this I made a drastic change, at least religiously. In a few short years I was a devout atheist. A real atheist. I wasn’t “mad at God.” I didn’t believe in God, so how could I be mad at something I didn’t believe existed? I was mad at humans for believing in such things, and at myself for being fooled so long.

I was engaged to a lovely Italian girl, Catholic through and through. She watched in despair as I changed my entire belief system. Everyone I knew was Catholic back then. All my friends and all my family, and none of them could relate to me. They felt much like I had just a few years earlier. They pitied me and were sad I’d “never know what it’s like to love God” like they did. Yet, here I was on the other side. And I wasn’t a monster. I knew love. I knew joy. I found beauty in places many folks couldn’t comprehend.

“I just don’t think I’ll be happy,” I said to her, unraveling all our arrangements and pulling out the carpet beneath her. Before you take out your violin, know that she landed on her feet and has exactly the family she always wanted. The one she wouldn’t have had with me. Getting married was the best thing I never did.

Christmas didn’t die with my atheism. Not yet, at least. I kept that fire burning for years. I was an atheist with a Christmas tree who still enjoyed the music and community surrounding the holiday. I bought Christmas presents for my new girlfriends, even the Jewish ones, and especially a 100% percent Italian girl who loved Christmas with an exuberance that was contagious. We’d wake and bake Christmas morning, tear into breakfast and presents and play video games. We had a fricking ball.

Then that relationship ended, around Christmas time, in fact, in the months that followed 9/11.  A lot of folks got closer to the ones they loved after 9/11. I went the other direction. I was already an angry atheist, but this was the icing on the cake.

I’m not an angry atheist anymore. If anything, I’m a complacent atheist, which is worse. I haven’t really celebrated Christmas since, though, and I don’t miss it at all. I feel a huge sense of relief that I’m not involved, actually. I used to be just as brainwashed to be a seasonal power consumer as the next guy – but this guy woke up.

While there are plenty of good ways to celebrate the holidays, on the whole Christmas represents too many things I have no respect for. I don’t respect lying to children about Santa Claus. I don’t respect being forced to buy things under the guise of some magical holiday. I certainly don’t respect the blind acceptance of religious falsehoods – which isn’t easy to say, especially when so many of the people I love still celebrate the holiday and follow the religion. But if they can tell me how much they love it, I have a right to express myself, too, don’t I? You can always turn me off, can’t you? Maybe you already have.

Hence, it can be lonely being an atheist at Christmas, or at least isolating. I’m lucky. So many of the folks I know are either atheists or agnostics now, all of which were either Christians, Baptists or Jews before. There’s more of us everyday.

Still, there are certain things I can’t get my head around, like folks praying to a God in the sky that grants them wishes. Is it a coincidence that kids do the same with Santa? Even when those prayers are selfless, the audacity is too much for me to handle. How can you think you’re humble if you also think the God that created everything is listening to you? That this God can intervene in your life to make a polyp benign, or allow you to score a touchdown, or find the hundred dollar bill you lost – but it can’t show itself for thirty seconds to finally convince every human being that it’s truly worth believing in? You know how many lives would be saved if that happened? But it won’t happen because it can’t happen, and I know why. So do millions of other atheists.

So yeah, it’s hard to be a free-thinking atheist and still find a way to celebrate the holidays, though it’s certainly not impossible. You can look to the solstice, you can look to family and friends, you can even look to the Santa myth, if that’s the direction you want to go in. You can do whatever you want. You can even treat Jesus like the myth he is and still enjoy the holidays. Me, I prefer ignoring it altogether. You should try it some time.

“How funny would it be if we went full Christmas this year?” my atheist girlfriend says to me. It’s important to note that we don’t buy each other presents, don’t decorate, hardly acknowledge the holiday at all. So this idea was really hysterical to us. It would be the exact opposite of who we are.

“That would be really funny,” I say. “Wreath on the door, Christmas tree, lights on the terrace. Maybe a big blow up Santa village in the living room?”
“Or we could do something really weird,” she suggests. 
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Like a Christmas yam?” she says, laughing.
“That would be great. With, like, a paper star hung on a paperclip.”
“No one would ever understand it,” she says.
“That’s exactly why we should do it.”

So, from one atheist to another, try not to let all this rampant religiosity and consumerism bring you down. You have the whole rest of the year for that. This season is yours, too. It may have even been yours first.

Celebrate what you want, however you choose to. Or don’t, no one’s watching – not a fictitious Santa or mythological God. Just the NSA.