No Stupid Questions

Christmas at this point isn't even a religious holiday.

Do people worship Santa Claus? I mean, they do sort of worship the God Consumerism, to be fair.

However, the baby Jesus ain't got shit to do with the modern version of this holiday.

Just ask the fucking Saturnalia trees we break out every year. The holiday has absolutely loads of pagan traditions present in it because when Constantine shouted out "Hey all you Romans, all of you are Christian now!" didn't actually work very well. So they started mashing existing traditions onto the "new" tradition. So the Romans just took Saturnalia and slapped Christmas on it and was like "this totally tracks!" to get people to accept Christianity as the new religion of the Empire.

I mean, holy fuck, middle eastern winters are far too cold for a baby in a manger. Kid would have frozen the fuck to death.

Whole thing is a joke anyway from fucks who don't know shit about history because the only book they bothered to ever try to read (and they only really read what their preacher told em) was the Bible.

If they read (and believed) other books, they would and should be embarrassed.

Christmas isn't a religious holiday. Christmas today has basically nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, just like how Halloween isn't celebrating the Grim Reaper. It's just a fun and festive time.

It's so weird when people refer to Christmas as religious holidays. Like, I know its Christianity origins, but Christians just stole it from pagans, gave it a different name and called it their own.

I live in an atheist country and everyone celebrates Christmas, just without all the religious bullshit.

A bunch of conservative Christians would be extremely mad

Capitalism forbids fewer reasons to buy things.

Then life would be a little more boring. I'm agnostic, but I love the Christmas spirit and Halloween spirit. I could live without the rest of the holidays.

We'd get non religious holidays developing / being promoted to sell a bunch of shit. Some people classify halloween as a "religious holiday" because of its roots as All Saints Day eve, but it's pretty clearly a nonreligious "dress-up / horror" holiday nowadays.

If there was no Christmas there would be some generic winter cosiness holiday (as xmas/ December actually is for most Western countries). I live in France and there's loads of "Christmas" junk but it's 99% non religious. Even compared to the UK, where some people complain about "Christmas loosing its roots", it's noticeable to me how few of the decorations or cards have any religious imagery (even pretty neutral things like stars or angels). There loads of snow and winter animals, no wise men/shepherds, let alone 'baby jesus'. France is officially opposed to religious holidays because they're a "secular state" but they keep a winter and spring public holdiays that are at the same time as Christmas and around Easter. But other public days off are just other non religious events (national holidays like Bastille day, workers rights on may day, etc.)

And in seasons like summer that didn't have big religious holidays (or not popular ones anyway), there's loads of secular sources of themes / merchandising. The Olympics and World Cup (or whatever sports your country is into) always end up filling the supermarkets with loads of cheap junk and create a shared topic to "being people together".

Another French holiday is the midsummer "fête de musique" which was created by the government decades ago to replace the dangerous (notionally Christian but clearly pagan) "fête de Saint Jean" where people built big bonfires and young men tried to jump over them (leading to lots of injuries!). Now all cities and towns and even small villages will organise some concerts or live music evenings.

Tldr : if companies weren't promoting religious holidays, they'd just find other holidays to sell stuff.

So, they’d keep Mother’s Day? The one invented by consumerism? But abandon the other ones that drive even more sales? Does that include Thanksgiving/Black Friday?

Then they would start losing a lot of money. Christmas is one of the biggest events. People will find ways to celebrate it still though.

What a boring life that would be. If the goal is to be more inclusive, how about the opposite direction and be more inclusive?

Still celebrate Halloween with costumes and candy and stuff but also Holi (I realize different theme) and Dia de Los Muertos. We really really need a holiday where we throw colored water balloons at each other (apologies if that offensive). How is that not global? But, for the love of God, not Carnevale, you haven’t seen what my co-workers look like

It would be easier for workers who are religious to take those days off; currently they're often "blackout" days with regards to time-off requests.

Huh. Well, the culture of the holidays wouldn't change in the rest of the populace, so the very first business to re-recognize and take advantage of holidays would make a lot more money than all their competitors over that period. Their competitors would all quickly follow suit, I imagine.

They'd loose loads of sales. I wouldn't mind, as I don't 'celebrate' those days anyway, but economically it would be bad for loads of stores and every company that is making or other way involved in all that junk.

It's more about commerce then religion anyway.

I would love to leave Christmas behind, but it is a huge percentage the stupid consumer-driven economy in the USA. I think it would upset the apple cart and put a lot of folks out of work for a while. I suppose things would stabilize and recover (unless riots and worse happened).

Christmas becoming a BFD was a gradual thing. It's one reason I don't care for Dickens. I don't blame him for all of it, but he certainly helped make it "mandatory fun" with his preachy novella. It's ironic, because he was moralizing against greed and now Christmas is all about greed.

They'd probably lose a lot of money, both from not having the sales and from the anger stoked by the "WAR ON CHRISTMAS!!!!!" guys

Without the "on the seventh day, he rested" adage, I would not get days off. I had this pulled on me by religious bosses to force me to give up my only day off. They rejoiced when I found God.

I will never work for religious nuts again.

“Target Promotes Atheism To Children”

Lots of companies would see their stock price lower as Christmas is a major generator of sales, both with sales and themed goods.

I've noticed that seems to be happening, especially with companies like Amazon, whom I work for, aside from the money they can make from it. That said, we also have an example of that in the form of old Soviet Russia. They had actually eliminated most holidays.

The "Christians" would commit a series of shootings and bombings.