As an atheist, I love decorating for the holidays with homemade dolls.
My great aunts and uncles lived together in a 10-bedroom, A-frame house on Lake Charlevoix, Michigan. Three sisters and their husbands, they were childless. They all worked in the insurance industry.
The three-story house had hidden passageways and rooms for the Underground Railroad. We kids loved playing hide-and-seek.
"The dolls are our children," they said. The men carved the doll faces and bodies, and made furniture. The women made clothes and accessories. Their dolls are in the Michigan State Children's Museum.
They always made two of each doll. One Whistler's Mother doll went to the president of France. It is in the Louvre Museum.
When I was five, my grandmother enrolled the four oldest girl cousins in the International Doll Club. Each Christmas, we received a doll from a different country, in native dress with a story, stamp and coin.
These dolls are 75 to 100 years old. I treasure them.
I do the Yule tree with secular ornaments. It's so not about Christianity at this point that I just go with it. In a couple of moves I lost a nice set of decorations. Years ago for reasons I didn't understand, Kmart had a Nativity for which you could buy Roman Legionairs. I understand the animals, and what I presume are wise men, but the legionairs were just odd. It also had a tent for the wise men. I bought the stuff that wasn't Nativity (no stable, Mary, Joseph, or Jesus) and had wise men, animals, and Roman Legionairs in a tent that I told everyone were my Saturnalia decorations.
I have been living on my own for 14 yrs. I am a single guy with no visitors. Which I can never figure out why people don't want to stop by. Needless to say, I don't see the need to decorate for any reason. Now if I had company that comes over on a regular basis, I might decorate for the hoildays.
I don't do any additional decorating for the holidays but there are a few Christmas items that I leave up in my house all year around.