this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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In an alternative universe, family is just Jewish and the neighbor is now forcing their religion on their neighbors.
I don't know of any religions that are against trees. And the Christmas tree's ties to Christianity are tenuous at best, pagans have been using evergreen boughs for centuries to decorate temples and whatnot, and the practice in Germany (where modern Christmas trees come from) likely came from that.
My Jewish coworkers also like Christmas trees, they just don't put any Christian symbology on it. If ties to Christianity were clear, we wouldn't allow our governments to place them in public areas.
What about the antitreeists? They hate trees.
*atreeists
Found the timbersaw main.
They’ve had their way for a long time and it’s still illegal at the federal level, but nearly half the country has laws for recreational trees now.
Most of the decorations are non-religious. Baubles descend from representations of apples for the "were halfway through winter" party, lights are just pretty, all that's religious is the star, but also stars are pretty. Mine has a flying spaghetti monster that my daughter made for me out of pipe cleaners in the mid 2000s
Christmas has little to do with Christianity by the time you start decorating trees n shit. I'm an atheist, born and raised. We still had a tree and everything. If anything, our pagan forefathers celebrated summer solstice long before they met any Christians and probably long before Christ even walked the earth.
Christmas has much more to do with Yule and Yule's predecessors than it does with Christ, at least for anyone outside of Christianity.
Indeed. In my language it's called "Jõulud".
Also in my previous comment I did mean winter solstice - but we do also celebrate summer solstice and always have. In the winter, there's a feast, which was supposed to be necessary to have a bountiful new year. In the summer, big fires are made to celebrate the sun. There were different gods and other mythological figures, but the key part that's still survived to this day, is sun worship. And to me, that's the most sensible religion you can have. One of the best comedians of all time agrees with me - or maybe I took it from him
I was wondering if you were Australian, Christmas is around the summer solstice here :)
Ah no, never been :( Though the Aussie youth working visa is very popular among Estonian youth, so I know several people who have.