This Holiday Season: Please Remember There Are Other Holidays Than Yours

Don't minimize other cultural traditions

Side note: The title of this piece brought to mind one of my favourite lines from my favourite series of books, The Dark Tower, by Stephen King. There’s a line where one of the main characters, a young boy, Jake, says to the main character, Roland, ‘there are other worlds than these’. The premise of The Dark Tower series is that there are lots of parallel universes — so in the books there are literally other worlds than these. Edited to add: this has nothing to do with what happens in the book, the title just brought to mind that single line.

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First of all, I’d like to wish all of you a very happy holidays! (and if for some reason they aren’t happy, I send you love and hugs).

Photo by Fadi Xd on Unsplash

I am not religious, so I don’t celebrate Christmas in any sort of religious way.

And even though I celebrate and enjoy Christmas personally (it was how I was raised, in Canada, to a protestant and catholic-not practicing though-family), every year at this time of the year — the holiday season — I’m keenly reminded that not everyone celebrates Christmas.

Christmas is the holiday/celebration/festivities that are kind of shoved down everyone’s throats at this time of year, almost to the exclusion of everything else. It’s everywhere you go, in stores and shops, Christmas music is playing — everything from carols to pop songs about it. And of course there’s the decorations all over as well — Christmas trees, Christmas presents, Christmas lights. It’s like the Santa’s North Pole exploded all over the world.

So when I wish people good tidings at this time of year, I don’t wish them Merry Christmas (unless I know specifically that is what they celebrate).

Instead I wish them a ‘happy holidays’.

That’s more inclusive.

Online, I usually say something like:

Wishing you a very happy holidays, however you celebrate!

Because I know that many others have other practices / traditions / rituals / beliefs that aren’t about Christmas.

Christmas is just the dominant holiday, which makes me wonder — how do people who don’t celebrate Christmas because they celebrate some other cultural belief or tradition — feel to have this one holiday in their face constantly — through decorations, music, people wishing them a Merry Christmas’ — and their own not acknowledged (or rarely — Hanukkah is also acknowledged to an extent).

Maybe they celebrate something with totally different rituals and traditions than the Christian Christmas.

Like Hanukkah.

Or maybe it’s Kwanzaa.

Or Bodhi Day.

Or Chinese New Year in the spring instead.

Or maybe something like just the Winter Solstice, or the Roman Saturnalia.

Or Yule if you’re pagan.

Here’s a bunch of them taken from the internet:

screenshot from Google

Or maybe they choose not to celebrate the holiday season at all, for a variety of reasons — from grieving a loved one they lost at this time of year and find it too hard to carry on celebrating without their person, to just choosing to opt out of the hectic busy commercialism of this time of year.

It actually took me a little bit to find a photo for the top of this article that wasn’t overly ‘Christmassy’ — and more neutral, in an effort to be inclusive and honour the fact that Christmas is not for everyone. That’s how pervasive Christmas is.

So this is just a friendly seasonal reminder to take a moment to remember that not everyone will have the same holiday beliefs and practices as you and I.

Sending you all warm holiday wishes and a dose of wonder at this time of year.

And don’t forget to live with a dose of wonder!

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