While no one seems to agree on the actual day of Jesus’ birth, most scholars agree that it wasn’t December 25th. Some have it in November. Others claim it was in March, and still more believe it must have been in September. But whatever day it was, it clearly wasn’t on my birthday, and that makes it even worse. Here I am, being robbed of my very own day by a ritual that isn’t even accurate! If only there were a god to pray to and ask for some kind of retribution.
My point is this: any child born on Christmas Day cannot have a real birthday. It’s not possible. There are some who have claimed that I turned to atheism due to my birthday melancholy, but while I will never celebrate my day of birth on the level that most enjoy theirs, I am not an atheist because of this. I am an atheist because I reject all stories that are not rooted in and supported by empirical data—because I do not need to have stories that make me feel better about that which I do not know or that which I fear.
I appreciate all that my mother and my grandmother tried to do. They can’t be held responsible for my failed childhood birthdays—they were up against aeons of ritual and tradition. But now, as a full-grown adult with my destiny in my hands, I hold myself responsible for my own happiness and no longer sit around, sullen and depressed, every Christmas. In fact, I enjoy celebrating Christmas in my own way. My wife and I fly out to visit her parents each year, usually on Christmas Day in fact. Since most people think it sacred, flights are usually half price—and if they’re overbooked, we often give up our seats in exchange for travel vouchers.
One Christmas we did just this, had a lovely evening in a nice hotel, got up on the 26th, flew into our destination and had a wonderful dinner with my wife’s parents. We awoke on the 27th, had a very nice gift exchange, ate birthday cake and played in the winter snow. While my wife’s parents believe in God, they aren’t really much for ritual. They just look forward to seeing us for the holidays, whichever day we arrive.
Whether travelling, staying in a hotel or enjoying my wife’s family, December 25th isn’t Christmas Day to us. My wife has taken to referring to it as Emerymas. Sure, Emerymas is a contrived and fully invented construct meant to mark the birth of my wife’s husband. But why not? If ancient priests could do it, so can my wife.
If you’re a kid born on the 25th, Christmas sucks. Emerymas, however? A day like any other day, with one very distinct exception: I was born. And according to my wife, that’s something to celebrate.
CATIE WILKINS
I remember being confused as a four-year-old, as I sat in assembly at primary school and everyone said the Lord’s Prayer. I did as I was told and joined in, saying, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’ But I thought we were thanking our dads for working hard at their jobs to bring us, their families, home our daily bread, so that we could have Marmite on toast, and jam sandwiches, and other nutritious bread-based snacks. I remember thinking that perhaps I wasn’t really eligible to join in anyway, as my dad didn’t actually work in heaven, he worked for Tesco. I kept my fears under my hat, but felt like a potential fraudster.
My dad, a supremely rational man, even when addressing four-year-olds, answered my question, ‘What happens when you die?’ logically and truthfully. He replied, ‘No one really knows, but we have lots of theories. Some people believe in heaven and hell, some people believe in reincarnation, and some people believe that nothing happens.’ The other four-year-olds were not privy to the open, balanced information that I had, leaving me the only four-year-old to suggest that heaven might not exist. Unlike John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’, this suggestion was not met with delight or praise or musical accolades. The other children just said I was wrong. I became more of an outsider.
I guess I must have continued to feel like an outsider, as when I was five I attempted to send a Christmas card to the Devil. Not to rebel—I was trying to cheer him up. I sent one to God as well, to keep it fair. I wasn’t taking sides in their cosmic disagreement.
The card to God (complete with made-up address 110 Love Street) said, ‘Well done, you must be very proud.’ The card to the Devil (who of course lived at 110 Hate Street) said, ‘Please try to have a good time, in spite of everything.’ I guess I thought he might be feeling blue or left out on the birthday of his archnemesis.
But I think I could relate more to the Devil, and could associate more with his underdog status of everyone hating him. I was chucked out of ballet at the age of four for being disruptive, so I think that the Devil and I both knew what it was like to be excluded from things—the eternal paradise for rebelling against the supreme being; I, a ballet class, for finding it hilarious to say ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ when the register was called.
I didn’t expect the Devil to write back. Everybody knows he’s a bad boy. But God didn’t write back either, and he had no excuse. I’d heard the phrases ‘Ask and you shall be given’ and ‘Seek and ye shall find’, but I had scientific evidence that Father Christmas was more communicative than either of them. I’d seen that he’d eaten the mince pies I’d left out for him, but when I’d asked God if I could become a mermaid, my legs had stayed resolutely in place.
However, I decided it was understandable that God was far busier than Father Christmas. After all, while they were both very old and had to keep their long white beards in shape, God had to work 365 days a year (except for Sundays), while Father Christmas only worked for one night, and he also only had to help children, not adults, leaving him more time to stuff his face with mince pies. I guess Father Christmas just had a better union.
I think I partly wanted to become a mermaid because of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark—if it happened again, at least I’d be able to swim away. I had always been a bit worried about this story from an animal rights perspective: the other children enjoyed the bit where the animals went in two by two, but I felt sorry for those who hadn’t made it on to the ark. For them, it must have been like an animal-based Titanic. My one consolation was the fact that all the sea creatures (including dolphins and sea horses) would have survived.
I officially called myself an atheist from the age of ten. I was the only atheist in my class, but the other kids and I did agree on one thing: I wasn’t going to heaven. (Though my reasoning was that you couldn’t go somewhere that didn’t exist.)
I had one ally in our physics teacher (who was an atheist, even though it was a C of E school). He told us the various things humans have believed about the world, from it being flat, to the sun going round the earth, and also told us about the various scientists who had been killed or imprisoned for making new discoveries that went against the doctrine of the church at the time.
He also made a joke which delighted me. Gesturing at the white-board he said, ‘People used to believe that heaven was up here, earth was in the middle, flat, and hell was down there below earth. Which of course we now know can’t be true, because hot air rises, and all the people in heaven would have got burned.’
This teacher said that science was like a box, and that we could never open its lid. We could, however, investigate in other ways: we could conduct experiments and try to recreate events to get the same results. So we could build an identical box, the same weight and size, and say, ‘I have discovered what is in the box’; but then, if the first box suddenly turned green, but our box didn’t, we would have to conclude, ‘Okay, I was wrong’, and start again to try to make our own box go green. In this way science was always learning, changing and expanding, but admitted to not being absolute.
When I heard that the money from this book was going to go to the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, I was really glad it was going to such a fantastic and worthwhile cause. And it seems appropriate that money raised from a book by atheists is going towards humans helping humans, in both a literal and practical sense.
December is historically a time when humans