Some of my very favorite Christmas songs of all time are song parodies: my friend Tim's hilariously on-target Christmas-themed parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Christmas Rhapsody" the entire "Very Scary Solstice" songbook from the H.P. It hurts like major surgery for me to make this rule. or at least chime in on the first verse before trailing off into awkward pauses and "La la la"s. For a song to make my list, a reasonable number of people at your holiday party should be able to sing it. Many of my favorite Christmas songs, atheist or otherwise, are on the obscure side: from the grisly, gothy, paganesque "Corpus Christi Carol" (I do love me some gruesome Christmas songs), to the simultaneously haunting and peppy "Patapan," to Tim Minchin's funny, touching, pointedly godless "White Wine in the Sun." But it's no fun singing Christmas songs by yourself. Yes, this rules out some truly excellent stuff. (I will, however, grant a "saints with magical powers" exemption to Santa.) It's about a Christian saint with magical powers. I'm not going to start making exceptions just so I can sneak in the "Boar's Head Carol." And yes, this rules out "Good King Wenceslas." Hey, I like it too, it's pretty and has a nice (if somewhat politically complicated) message about how rich kings should help poor people.
This is the key, the raison d'etre of this whole silly game. Songs cannot have any mention of God, Jesus, angels, saints, or miracles. So, with the help of my Facebook friends, I've compiled a list of Christmas songs that atheists can love unreservedly. But for some time now, I've been on the lookout for Christmas songs that I can sing entirely happily, without getting into annoying theological debates in my head. I'm content to sing most of these songs anyway (except "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," which always makes me cringe). And I do notice the more screwed-up content of many Christmas songs more than I used to: the guilty self-loathing, the fixation on the blood sacrifice, the not- so- subtle anti-Semitism. It's harder for me to sing out lustily about angels and magic stars and the miracle of the virgin birth, without rolling my eyes just a little. It is, however, definitely the case that, since I've become an atheist activist, my pleasure in many Christmas carols has been somewhat diminished. Some atheists even like Christmas carols. But it's not like all atheists are Grinchy McScrooges. And some of us do rather resent the cultural hegemony of one particular religious tradition being crammed down everybody's throat, in a grotesque, mutant mating of homogenized consumerism and saccharine piety. What with the whole "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" thing. Sure, most of us would like for our governments to not be sponsoring religious displays at the holidays. And we find our own ways to adapt/ create/ subvert the holiday traditions to our own godless ends. Add in a culturally- sanctioned excuse to spend a month of Saturdays eating, drinking, flirting, and showing off our most festive shoes, and we're totally there. Especially when the season in question is dark and wet and freezing cold. Plenty of atheists recognize the need for rituals that strengthen social bonds and mark the passing of the seasons. Heck, even Richard Dawkins likes Christmas.
It's widely assumed that atheists, by definition, hate Christmas.
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