Let me extend my best wishes for the holiday season - Happy Festivus and Happy Solstice

I don't celebrate christmas either. But I do celebrate the winter solstice. There is nothing like seeing the days get longer and you know that soon you will get warm again outdoors. This year to celebrate the good lady and I are taking a cruise to the Panama Canal. After commercial fishing off the Oregon and Washington coast for 22 years I still have a hard time getting warm. So happy halidays to all of you, the halidays is not a misspelling just old english.
dinga

Happy holidays and Winter Solstice to you Nubi. May it be a wonderful one.Good mother takes care of us all don't she?

yeah, over the years too many unpleasant things have happened on or around Christmas for me to feel good about it.... and the commercialisation is simply revolting.

Solstice puts me in mind of those powerful standing stones. Of millions of years of humans looking up at the stars at night and connecting with the Universe.

Festivus is just crazy fun.

One of the main reasons I'm not a big fan of Christmas, is that it was introduced by the Catholic church.
And as such, it has some fairly nasty traits similar to what happened in the parishes as well.

What I mean is that most people "try to be nicer" for this period. However, they don't care about being complete jerks the rest of the year. Which is very similar to what happened at confession: a person could do the most horrific stuff, and then confess and "clear his/her conscious" by paying penance (usually a bribe for the pastor).

Anyway, I suppose that an effort to be better for a short period every year is better than it not happening at all.

I love how Santa is derived from Siberian shamans giving amanita shrooms to reindeer and then drinking their psilocybin-laden urine and thinking they're flying. Also, "Machine Elves" hard at work are a common hallucinatory theme

Yeah for yet another decimated culture by monotheism courtesy of the god of Abraham. The butcher's bill must be well into the billions of deaths by now. Praise be to Genocide Jesus the get of divine rape. Allahu Akbar. Boom!

Ah, no thanks. Pot sounds better than drinking that.

I'm pretty sure. Can't think of much nastier than reindeer urine

Sure that there is but don't know if I want to go down that road at the moment.