Reasons to be thankful this Christmas

by Adrian Tippetts

Among some atheists, there is a certain squeamishness about wishing someone a  ‘Merry Christmas’. This is silly. Personally, I’m happy to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to one and all over this festive season of goodwill, without believing a word of it. It’s a greeting we have inherited from our culture. Why change a habit of a lifetime: for me, it’s synonymous with visits to close family and friends, the abundance of food and Laphroaig, time off to do a bit of serious reading and the spectacular views of the frost-covered Peak District.

There are many things I can’t stand about Christmas, especially the overt consumerism and that inescapable, ubiquitous drone of seasonal doggerel from Slade, Wizzard, Maria Carey and Kirsty MacColl polluting every retail outlet, and littering the singles charts every year. Give me Carols on the village green over that any day.  But in short, everything I look forward to or loathe at this time of year has an entirely secular origin.

It will be no comfort to those zealots who wail each year about the lack of religious seasonal greetings cards in supermarkets (perhaps there isn’t such a market for that stuff in the first place?), but they should realise that I am far from alone in this. The need to for festivity and solidarity with our fellow human beings at the darkest, coldest time of the year long predates any mythical event in first-century Palestine. The tree, mistletoe and other Yuletide greetings have Pagan origins. The reason why December 25^th is celebrated is because, when Christianity became the state religion in the fourth-century Roman Empire, the powers-that-be simply hijacked the celebration of Mithras as the date to honour the birth of their saviour.

This time of year gives us an opportunity to be immensely thankful, and we don’t need the supernatural to express this. For there is a birth in the universe we should honour. Somewhere around 400 centuries ago, Cro-Magnon man had evolved enough to use language, and started imagining, planning innovating, improving tools, developing rituals, creating art and passing on ideas. It heralded the arrival of a brain intelligent enough to enquire about the world around it, and ask ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what if?’ As far as we know, this is the first and only time such an occurrence has happened in the universe.

We are lucky that, out of all the hundreds of millions of species that are or have ever been, we were born with human minds, able to break the raw Darwinian rules of the Savannah. 

Occasionally one hears sorry tales of folks who misplaced the winning National Lottery ticket. Play the world’s smallest violin: haven’t we won that lottery an infinite number of times already by simply being here, considering the trillions of DNA combinations that could be here in our place? And what of the chances that our century, 140 million or so centuries since the Big Bang, happens to be in the spotlight?  In ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’, Richard Dawkins compares this to an ant, on a journey between New York and San Francisco, being hit by a penny.

Seeing our mind-bogglingly great fortune from these perspectives should encourage us to enquire as much as possible about the universe we find ourselves in, pursue our paths to happiness and do our bit to create a world where others are free to reach their full potential too. After all, our one and only shot at this lasts a mere 950 months or so. Our mortality and brevity are our great unifiers, and we should make the most of our humanity while we can. 

Oh – I almost forgot: the birth we should celebrate is that of ‘purpose’, and I encourage you to fill 2012 with as much of it as possible.

To all readers, whether of faith or not, a Merry Christmas! X