This means no sales, no themed merchandise, no decorations. December 25 and most other day are treated just like any other day for all stores malls, restaurants, ect.
You’d still get non religious holiday events like mothers days, or independence days.
What whould change?
That would never happen. Those events are too profitable.
I’m not sure you understand the words “what if”
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They would loose a lot of profit. FIFY
It’s so weird when people refer to Christmas as religious holidays. Like, I know its Christianity origins, but Christians just stole it from pagans, gave it a different name and called it their own.
I live in an atheist country and everyone celebrates Christmas, just without all the religious bullshit.
What atheist country do you live in?
Czechia.
A bunch of conservative Christians would be extremely mad
Disagree. Christians hate the fact that Christmas is so commercialised. Although they would probably still be mad anyways.
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To be clear: “the War on Christmas” is manufactured to rile up Christians’ persecution complex so they Christmas even harder in response, which means more sales for gifts, decorations, food items, fucking Christian Pride merch or some shit, more angry donations to Jesus-posturing politicians who wage class warfare against these same people.
It’s capitalism: you’re always being sold
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Keyword here is conservative. They got mad when Starbucks stopped putting Christmas patterns on their cups.
“Target Promotes Atheism To Children”
Christmas isn’t a religious holiday. Christmas today has basically nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, just like how Halloween isn’t celebrating the Grim Reaper. It’s just a fun and festive time.
I always considered it the mid-winter celebration. A time to break into some of the stored food (sugar-preserved fruit anyone?). Basically a way to raise the spirits since autumn harvest was long gone and it felt a long way til spring.
You’re not wrong.
We’d get non religious holidays developing / being promoted to sell a bunch of shit. Some people classify halloween as a “religious holiday” because of its roots as All Saints Day eve, but it’s pretty clearly a nonreligious “dress-up / horror” holiday nowadays.
If there was no Christmas there would be some generic winter cosiness holiday (as xmas/ December actually is for most Western countries). I live in France and there’s loads of “Christmas” junk but it’s 99% non religious. Even compared to the UK, where some people complain about “Christmas loosing its roots”, it’s noticeable to me how few of the decorations or cards have any religious imagery (even pretty neutral things like stars or angels). There loads of snow and winter animals, no wise men/shepherds, let alone ‘baby jesus’. France is officially opposed to religious holidays because they’re a “secular state” but they keep a winter and spring public holdiays that are at the same time as Christmas and around Easter. But other public days off are just other non religious events (national holidays like Bastille day, workers rights on may day, etc.)
And in seasons like summer that didn’t have big religious holidays (or not popular ones anyway), there’s loads of secular sources of themes / merchandising. The Olympics and World Cup (or whatever sports your country is into) always end up filling the supermarkets with loads of cheap junk and create a shared topic to “being people together”.
Another French holiday is the midsummer “fête de musique” which was created by the government decades ago to replace the dangerous (notionally Christian but clearly pagan) “fête de Saint Jean” where people built big bonfires and young men tried to jump over them (leading to lots of injuries!). Now all cities and towns and even small villages will organise some concerts or live music evenings.
Tldr : if companies weren’t promoting religious holidays, they’d just find other holidays to sell stuff.
Now what happens to a religion that is, for the most part, now separated from capitalism?
Really depends on the religion. There are some religions that aren’t organized at all, and are fully self practiced. They don’t require things to be sold.
The religion of capitalism is a different beast though. I would say that people need things to celebrate in life though, or they tend to get very hostile. It seems to me that the more communal an event is the better the effect is on society, as people can set aside a lot of grievances for the festivities.
So, they’d keep Mother’s Day? The one invented by consumerism? But abandon the other ones that drive even more sales? Does that include Thanksgiving/Black Friday?
Thanksgiving and black Friday are not religious so they’d stay I imagine.
Thanksgiving is very much religious — who do you think they were thanking?
Black Friday though is very much corporations thanking their marketing departments.
Valentine’s day celebrates St. Valentine, St. Patrick’s day is obvious, Halloween or All Hallows Evening is all about the next day being All Saints Day. Easter is also obvious.
Hanukkah is religious, Diwali is religious, Ramadan is religious.
Pretty much every holiday that lines up with a celestial event has multiple religious holidays clustering around it.
Even Chinese New Year could be considered religious, although Western and Orthodox New Years are arguably not.
It pretty subjective I don’t know much about Thanksgiving as a Canadian we have we have a differnt one then the US. I never understood what ours was even about other then turkey. So if it’s religious then I honestly had no clue.
As many others have pointed out. If we strip all meaning of these events and just make the entirely commercial then it doesn’t much matter if they where intended as religious events or not.
With that in mind I wonder if separating the events from capitalism might actually empower them…
They’d loose loads of sales. I wouldn’t mind, as I don’t ‘celebrate’ those days anyway, but economically it would be bad for loads of stores and every company that is making or other way involved in all that junk.
It’s more about commerce then religion anyway.
Then life would be a little more boring. I’m agnostic, but I love the Christmas spirit and Halloween spirit. I could live without the rest of the holidays.
We can have these without the commercialism can’t we? Homemade decorations and costumes have more value and the act of making them with your family provides the time to talk about what these traditions are about.
Oddly I don’t do Christmas at home, aside from sharing a couple gifts. So its going about the city or to the mall where I tend to experience the decorations and festive atmosphere. As well as driving around and looking at people’s light shows and lawn decorations.
Not sure how that would be impacted, but I would miss it if it wasn’t there.
Yeah I don’t necessarily buy a lot of things when I go out during christmas time, but the lights and decorations just add to the “christmas spirit” for me.
Do you live in a place with snow?
No.
Chriatmas itself is great, its the obnoxious music and decorations that go up mid October that I hate
What a boring life that would be. If the goal is to be more inclusive, how about the opposite direction and be more inclusive?
Still celebrate Halloween with costumes and candy and stuff but also Holi (I realize different theme) and Dia de Los Muertos. We really really need a holiday where we throw colored water balloons at each other (apologies if that offensive). How is that not global? But, for the love of God, not Carnevale, you haven’t seen what my co-workers look like
Huh. Well, the culture of the holidays wouldn’t change in the rest of the populace, so the very first business to re-recognize and take advantage of holidays would make a lot more money than all their competitors over that period. Their competitors would all quickly follow suit, I imagine.
I mean that’s possible but whould they even need to? If one company had a “Christmas sale” and other had a “boxing week blowout” will folks even care, or will they just go to what place has the better deals?
This is the corporate version of the prisoner’s delima.
And no, corporations would absolutely try to fuck over their competitors.
Like what would happen if stores gave up possibly their most profitable period of the entire year? Christmas would go on via Etsy and eBay and such. It might slowly die as the years go on, but Christmas has a lot of momentum even if stores aren’t selling the gear.
Then they would start losing a lot of money. Christmas is one of the biggest events. People will find ways to celebrate it still though.
I think the beauty of this line of social media is that it is so anonymous in the sense that it doesn’t matter who is behind the username. It can be the most basic bitch in Ohio, a shut-in from Italy, a porn star from Hungary or a chart breaking pop star from London. As long they have something interesting to contribute, it does not matter at all who they are. No need to prove anything. Everybody can just be.
Edit: Oops, wrong post. But I’ll leave it here, in the name of Eris!
Also the complete lack of context to why I’d ask the question. I could be a writer, this could be some nefarious data scheme, or im just dumb and curious. Doesn’t really matter.
Really I’d just been watching somthing like Defunctland and hearing about cool ideas that failed because they where not profitable enough.
I wondered what if that happened to religion. What might that look like. How many people whould it take to stop giving a crap about Christmas for companies to just be like “yhea lets just not do that anymore”. And without Christmas would the rate of those engaged in Christianity just fall slowly? Whould that be all it takes?
Probably not. But figured I’ll get some alternative perspective.
Oh, butts. I replied to the wrong post. The one I intended to respond asked if there were celebrities on the feediverse.
I must admit, it gave me great confusion to read your response in my inbox. And now amusement.
No worries. It was shocking relivent for a wrong post.
