Since age 13, I have been an atheist.

So, I celebrate the Winter Solstice with my daughter and friends. We enjoy a wonderful meal and exchange wrapped gifts. No Christmas tree or Nativity creche at my house.

Instead, I decorate with handmade dolls made by my great-aunts and uncles in Charlevoix, Michigan. They were three sisters and their husbands. Childless, they lived together in a huge, A-frame chateau on Lake Charlevoix. "The dolls are our children," Aunt Lotty said.

The men made the bodies and furniture. The women made the doll's clothes and hair, and painted the faces. Their dolls are in the Michigan State Museum. They always made two of each doll.

One "Whistler's Mother" doll was a gift to France; it is in the Louvre Museum. An Emmett Kelly clown doll went to Emmett Kelly. My brother has the other one.

Also, my grandmother enrolled us four girl cousins in the International Doll Club. Each Christmas we received a doll from a different country, with a stamp, coin and story.

i'm jewish. no christmas. for a couple years in my young adulthood i used to go to a christmas party thrown by a friend every year. there was no religion involved; most of the guests were japanese and also not christian.

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There's plenty about Xmas that has nothing to do with religion.

Xmas is really a pagan tradition anyway. It’s just about food, family and I happen to love the lights. I get my boys involved in some volunteering in the county around the holidays. It’s important for them to to learn early.

I think it is a pagan festival. I like to think of pagan as human. Maybe it isn't always but needing something to brighten up wintertime definitely is human.

No, it’s Yule.

Call it Yule please.

Our children are out of the nest and our big family holiday is Thanksgiving, so Christmas is usually just another day for my wife and I. Now with our son living with us for a couple of years post-college we will probably do some perfunctory small gift exchange, in fact my wife for some reason has a wild hair to put up a tiny Charlie Brown style tree and have a small gift exchange when both her kids are here at Thanksgiving.

The kids usually spent Christmas with their biological father out of state which leaves the actual day as a completely ordinary one for my wife and I. We avoid Black Friday and all that sort of thing like the plague. Also my main client and most of their industry is basically shut down between Christmas and New Year's which is a nice time to either rest or get some concentrated work done without interruption. So for me it's a tranquil time, too, without constant interruptions.