Another atheist's rambling on Christmas

The atheist of the title being me. I know I have blogged about a similar topic very recently, but this is still Christmastime after all. This post is also an excuse to upload on this blog a picture of my family's Christmas tree in Chicoutimi. That might illustrate why I find this forced stay in England for the season so cruel. As you know, I received The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, which I have started reading with great interest. Books you love often express things you have been feeling or thinking before and this one does exactly this. Of course it depends of the writer and there is a wide variety of them, but it is fascinating to see how my own experience and perspective on things is an echo of so many other people's. It is good to feel that I am not alone. Reading the book puts things into perspective as well: what I blog about is not always very original.

Christmas for me is a celebration that is now self-justifiable: I celebrate because it's Christmas. I couldn't care less about the veracity of the Nativity legend, which is exactly this, a legend, but I love its imagery and its icons. We could commemorate the death of Balder (as probably many Germanic European did at a time) that it would not make any difference to me. And as I said before, a Christmas tree is a decorated Yggdrasil. Christmas is a secular holiday that took the guise of a Christian one.

Anyway, I thought I would put some video from Youtube on the subject of Christmas for an atheist that I found fascinating. It is from ProfMTH, who made videos which I always loved, because he explains things simply but never dunbimg them down, but also because of his Catholic background, which puts his atheism and his deconversion akin to mine (except mine was not half as dramatic as his). Oh, and it has an interpretation of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, which gave me goosebumps. I put a lot of carols on the blog these days...