An Atheist’s Christmas

by Gene Shelburne

Did you see the paper this morning?” My preacher friend who questioned me was not a happy camper.

“Yeah,” I responded, a bit puzzled. “What about it?”

“You didn’t see that article?” He saw the blank look on my face. “The one on the front page.”

“Oh!” my brain finally clicked in, “you mean the one about atheists doing Christmas. You didn’t like it?”

“If I didn’t have friends at the paper,” he steamed, “I’d be yelping. Why would they run a story like that?”

“On the front page, no less,” I agreed.

“And it certainly was not news,” my colleague muttered. “It was a fluff piece, potentially offensive to a majority of the paper’s readers at this time of year, even if it had been run on the op-ed page.”

When I first read the article about skeptics and Christmas, I didn’t boil over. I did chortle that they must have been hard up for hard news that morning.

Looking back now with time for more reasoned assessment, I am struck by how much more complicated our world is becoming.

At mid-century no newspaper in America would have published that piece. Any Christmas story back then would have been just that, a story reflecting traditional beliefs and practices 98 percent of the readers shared.

Alternative viewpoints are so highly vocal and visible today that a good editor must address them.

But, I found myself wondering, would any responsible newspaper dare to publish such a story about the major holiday of a minority religion?

Can you imagine the Muslim community’s response to a front-page story on non-religious ways for skeptics to participate in their holiest rituals on their holiest of days? About this much my clergyman friend was right. In America today only Christianity gets treated this way.

Do you want to know my first reaction to the atheist Christmas story? I doubt you ever could guess it.

As I read the story, I was taken aback by how much one atheist’s family Christmas resembled my own as a child. True to their Puritan roots my parents repudiated all “Christian” holidays. We decorated a tree and exchanged gifts while we scrupulously ignored Bethlehem.

Maybe that’s why I love Christmas so much. I missed so many Christmases when I was young. Today few things thrill me more than celebrating God’s entry into our world as the Christ child.