Thanksgiving has come and gone, refrigerators around the country are full of leftovers, and millions of people are spending all their money on Christmas presents today. The Christmas season is upon us. So, what’s the reason for the season?

I think we should accept that the American Christmas of today is a secularized and commercialized holiday. It’s all about time off work, spending time with family, giving them crap they don’t want, and drinking to be able to handle spending time with said family (or to cope with being alone on Christmas). The Christmas of today is the secularized version of a Christianized version of a pagan holiday, actually a bunch of them.

The Christ Mass was very strategically scheduled by the Roman Catholic Church to fall on the day of celebration of Mythra’s birth and very close to Yule and other pagan solstice holidays. It is not the time of Jesus’s birth in either 5 BC in Nazareth (Matthew’s version) or 4 AD in Bethlehem (Luke’s version), if there ever was such a person in the first place. It was simply a way of helping pagans adjust to Christianity.

I think this song puts the meaning of Christmas, at least for atheists quite well: