Why Do Athiests Celebrate Easter, Christmas and other Religious Holidays
or, Why Are Athiests Forced into Celebrating Religious Holidays by Familial Obligation.

I'm kind of grumpy because I knew today was coming for a while and knew that my day was going to be hijacked by Easter. What is Easter anyway, why are there rabbits leaving chicken eggs hidden?

I don't know and I don't really care anymore. All I know is that I am being disempowered to do what I might like to with my day. Instead, we drive an hour, hang out for four or five hours and then drive another hour home. And that gets to be my Sunday.

I'm sure that I will enjoy myself when I get there, I'm sure that it will end up being fun (fun is a subjective term though). And irregardless, its not what I choose to do with my day but I am doing it out of a sense of obligation. I suppose that this earns me a future favor, some chit I can call in when I want to not do something like this.

Perhaps I should explain my position a little further and better.

I hate holidays for the most part. With the exception of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July (and, in Santa Cruz, October 9, the city celebration), yep, I hate them. Christmas? Hate it. Valentine's Day? Hate it with a passion. Halloween? Nah, can't hate any day when strangers give you candy and its alright.

Why do I hate most holidays? Because they aren't normal, they are highly stressful times that defeat self esteem, that tear apart families and that can create deep rifts, chasms between blood relations. Sure, the meal can be almost worth the insanity that leads up to it, almost but not quite.

Holidays are retail cash cows, artificially pumped up, hyped and over marketed until the populance is numbed into compliance. Stupified into conformity so that it all feels normal. Christmas the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ? Um, no, Biblical scholars have figured out that Jesus was born in like May. So why December 25? Oh yeah, its a pagan holiday. How do you stamp out the competition? Usurp their days into your own.

Holidays are about guilt, they are about coercion, about obligation. If you don't buy a stupidly huge box of chocolates and just-for-that-week-over-priced roses, then you're a scumbag. Don't take on massive consumer debt to PROVE your love for your loved ones? Then you're dirt.

This is the destructive message delivered by holiday retail marketing messages. What's that? You didn't assume another financial burden to demonstrate your love for your __________ (insert your relation in here)? Why then, you should burn in hell you unloving jerkface.

Whatever, I do think I'm going to take my motorcycle and at least have some fun that way. Unless I'm not allowed to.