The Celebration Of Holidays

There are a great many reasons why someone might celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, as well as multiple reasons why people might oppose these holidays--and many of them are erroneous.  Objections are less commonly voiced, but they could include the idea that, say, celebrating Christmas is immoral because of its extreme consumeristic associations, but this would be to oppose a thing based on how it is approached by a society of tradition and emotion-driven irrationalists instead of for its own core nature.  Inversely, the more culturally visible ideology here is that holidays matter because they are longstanding customs or because they make some people emotionally excited.

Though tradition is an idiotic reason to do anything (unless the tradition is not irrational or immoral and one recognizes this, participating without believing in fallacies on the subject), even the motivations behind this kind of celebration are often incomplete or asinine.  Some people might use Thanksgiving to celebrate things that, if they are deserving of gratitude, would be worthy of it on each day of the year, yet they make little to no effort to embrace gratitude year-round.  Some people might celebrate Thanksgiving out of a genuinely emotionalistic love of family member, no matter how irrationalistic or morally pathetic they are.  Some people might participate in Thanksgiving gatherings and meals for no reason other than because it is a tradition, and I do not mean that someone recognizes it as an arbitrary holiday, refuses to make any assumptions about it, and happens to subjectively enjoy the holiday without any sort of philosophical idiocy involved.

There is nothing in the Bible that directly addresses anything about the date of the birth of Jesus within any calendar system, and it is very unlikely that December 25th out of all 365 days in the Gregorian calendar is the right day of the year.  Celebrating Christmas is idiotic when it is motivated by the unverifiable belief (not that anything more than possibility can be known about historical events like a birth), just as it is idiotic when it is motivated by secular consumerism or emotionalistic love of tradition.  If a person does not make assumptions but wants to celebrate something like family or the advent of Jesus in a rationalistic manner, then of course there is no issue with the mere celebration of Christmas.

There is certainly nothing inherently special or morally significant about gathering with family, especially to only have superficial, artificially positive conversations with them, whatever the cultural norm for a given holiday usually entails.  Anyone who does this emotionalistically is a fool, but that does not mean there is no way to celebrate holidays and even navigate asinine or random traditions (all traditions, as opposed to logical truths, are random) without betraying reason.  A rationalist can even celebrate holidays because of emotional investment without slipping into emotionalism, for the beliefs and intentions behind the simple participation in holiday festivities make all the difference here.