A very merry `Secular Christmas' to everyone

Creating new traditions makes the season more inclusive, writes Beisan Zubi.

I love Christmas. It's maybe off-brand for an agnostic socialist, but it's my favourite time of the year. And with the year we're having, I'm looking forward to it even more than usual.

My parents immigrated to Canada in the 1970s after my father's conservative Muslim family didn't approve of my hippie Christian mother. Neither of them taught my brother and I about their religions; it felt like a sore subject for a good chunk of my youth.

But we always celebrated Christmas.

Not the Greek Orthodox Christmas that my mom's family observed on a different day every year (my biggest beef with Easter — so inconsistent); we celebrated the cultural Christmas that made its way into our family home.

My entire understanding of Christmas was built by 1990s movies and television specials and politically correct public schools, and it evolved every year. The shared experiences helped me relate to my peers at home, a place that wasn't always relatable. It also provided me with my own traditions and irreplaceable memories of my family and friends as the years went by.

We celebrated what I call Secular Christmas (I should also add that we celebrated Secular Eid — $20 and a lamb dinner).

Secular Christmas can take a lot of work, but let's be honest, the last week of the year is when I would have got around to doing it anyway. And even though I think it's a made-up controversy, I'll state here I'm on Team “Merry Christmas.” It's the only time we get to call anything “merry,” so I like to take advantage.

My Secular Christmas folklore originates in the North Pole (postal code H0H 0H0). Traditions can include homemade cookies in tins and Jingle Bells over mall speakers and lottery tickets in stockings and cats dressed like elves.

Secular Christmas has its own canon: Home Alone, Gremlins, Elf, Die Hard, hundreds of TV

The season is always best celebrated by showing those you love how much you care about them.

sitcom specials. There's a whole discourse on the problematic elements of Love Actually and I am personally responsible for a good chunk of Mariah Carey's annual “All I Want for Christmas is You” windfall.

The food is special enough to crave, but intense enough that you wouldn't want it to be the situation year-round. The official Secular Christmas snacking season is three weeks of unsustainable behaviour, more than enough time for eggnog to turn from a sweet treat into thick regret.

And my Secular Santa is a philanthropist foster parent to an endangered mystical species whose sole purposes in life are delivering mirth to human children and maintaining a healthy and loving relationship with his brilliant wife.

The season is always best celebrated by showing those you love how much you care about them; this year, we're doing that in entirely new ways.

New Secular Christmas memories are created every year, and 2020 will bring us some doozies: Zoom dinner parties, festive face masks, disinfected presents, gingerbread-scented hand sanitizer. On the bright side, mistletoe is finally cancelled. It was always creepy, but now it's a public health risk.

I suspect a lot of Canadians have also built their own version of Christmas, that took what they wanted from dominant culture and filled in the gaps with their own traditions and experiences. This allows more of us to feel included in the parts of the season that bring comfort and are especially needed right now: community, celebration, connection.

Life in a modern, diverse society is full of contradictions. Our civic calendar being centred on Christian holidays has the same roots as many of Canada's most heinous acts. But I also believe that when ideas are forced on us, they become ours to define and shape. Sometimes the best we can do is shape them into something that brings us closer to the people we love.

This year, we might not be able to gather in the same ways we're used to, but creating new traditions is the reason for the Secular Christmas season. So here's wishing an early Merry Christmas to all of us celebrating in radically different ways, together. Beisan Zubi is a writer and consultant living in Waterloo, Ont.