How do multi-faith families deal with Christmas?

[Marinetta]

If you are in a family or mixed religions how do you deal with Christmas? I don't consider myself religious and have never celebrated Christmas as an adult although as a child we did. My partner is muslim and doesn't usually celebrate christmas either. However we live in a very catholic country where a big deal is made of Christmas and gifts are given on the 25th December and 6th January. Because its such a big thing here its impossible to avoid it and we don't want our son to feel left out so we were thinking about giving him a few small Christmas gifts but not do any of the decorations or anything. It would be interesting to hear how other families deal with Christmas.

We are atheists, but Christmas is huge in our house. I used to love it (and have been an atheist from a very young age) and I have tried to make it magical for my children. Its history predates Christianity and to me it is much broader than Christianity. I know people from all sorts of faiths and wordviews celebrating it. In my family we don't have religious symbols like a nativity or angels and we don't read about Mary and Joseph. However, we read tons of winter and non-religious Christmas stories, bake cookies, have a big tree, a fancy meal and presents. I would say, make it your own. Give it the meaning you want it to have.

@Yolande7 sounds like you've found a way to integrate christmas into an atheist setting and I love the idea of keeping the traditions but not linking it with religion. What do you do about Santa? I found out at a very young age that Sant doesn't exist and it didn't bother me and I am considering not even introducing the idea of Santa to my son but rather just telling him from the beginning that the gifts are from the people who care about him. Did you introduce the idea of Santa or not?

We are living in country that doesn't do santa.
For our own children once old enough, we will probably follow local traditions so they get similar to friends etc. - local folklore, food and drink traditions leading up to it
Then do main gifts from us/close family.
Plus a small stocking from santa. This kept very simple, probably just a chocolate santa, satsuma, and some small token gift. Will probably do the whole leaving a carrot and tasty cookies for santa and reindeer (or me) also.
That way they will still do the santa vibe in case we are back in England around xmas, and so they have similar to cousins, plus its in virtually every English christmas book and story.

We had Santa in a big way. He wrote my children letters each year and we fed his reindeers. He once even forgot one of his bells at our house when he had to rush off, which we have used to start our handing out of presents ever since. I had no worries about him, because I have yet to meet an adult who believes in him. That problem solves itself. However, there are so many lovely books and stories about him and I did not want my children to miss out on that. I highly recommend "Auntie Claus" - a firm favourite in our house.

We "celebrate" it on the day or day before with the English side, their family would take turns hosting. We'll watch some xmas films and even have up a string of fairy lights in the house - which really are winter lights to keep us feeling cosy and stay up til spring, cus SAD !! We'll buy small gifts for the nieces and nephew and our kids receive xmas gifts too (just not from us) .
My kids know santa isn't real, and that we aren't Christians, but we take part in the day to be with family who do. Which isn't happening this year...... since they were quite horrid to me last year.
So i spose will decide at some point what we'll do this year if anything....

Thanks for the input, some great ideas about how to go about celebrating without focusing too much on religion.
I think for this year we probably won't do much as my son is still too young to be aware of what's going on but we will take these points in to consideration next year so we can make it a special time for him.

My background is Sikh and my husband is atheist although he grew up with christian values at school but growing up as a British Sikh I celebrated Christmas. Similarly to how my secular white British friends did...I still believed in Santa, left a mince pie milk and a carrot out, we did stockings and presents. And I read all my Christmas books in the run up to the big day. I still understood the significance of Christmas for Christians but we celebrated it for family time and we had a roast and everything. I even went to midnight mass as a child with my neighbours as I wanted to learn more. As a couple we haven't found it hard to combine our two cultures at christmas as essentially the values we take from it are the same. Anyway hope that helps xx

I try to the religious festivals from both our religions (well, I'm actually atheist, but my family still does Christmas. Some vaugely Catholic, mostly not). Big family Christmas with my mum / grandma / aunts etc; big meal and celebration with traditional food for Eid; house decorations in Ramadan.

The hardest thing is that Eid and Ramadan in the UK aren't big cultural events like they are in Egypt where my DH is from. So he usually ends up feeling a bit lonely and miserable because it "doesn't feel like Eid". Unless we visit his family (in Egypt) for the celebration, we haven't found a good way of making the festivals our own in the UK yet.

In my family only stocking gifts were from Father christmas. (Small token gifts.)

You can’t not ‘do’ santa! There’s nothing worse than being that kid who feels that they are missing out on the fun that all the other kids are having - especially something that is so ‘big’ and unavoidable.

My family that are from the ME, some still live there, and are Muslim still do Santa! Jesus is a prophet in Islam, so it’s cool to celebrate Christmas (as a prophets birthday rather than Christ’s birthday iykwim). Were there any traditions that you did/loved as a child around Christmastime?

Those in the U.K. (who are observant) manage ok with religious and foreign country (ie new year) celebrations here. It’s just what you make of it I suppose.

You can definitely decide not to "do" Santa and other Xmas traditions if you're not comfortable with them. It's a tricky season to navigate, and that feeling of being left out is real. England seems to do Xmas in such a big pervasive way it does feel impossible to avoid. But it doesn't mean you can't set boundaries, even if other people don't understand, feel you're missing out etc.

OH and I are Jewish so we don't celebrate Christmas ourselves, but we have relatives and friends with different religious backgrounds - atheists, Christians etc. We make a distinction between visiting other people's celebrations at their houses and what we do at home ourselves. For instance, we have never had a tree or decorations at home. We light Hanukkah candles and enjoy celebrating that (there's usually a party at shul, etc) but it's really not a Big Deal Holiday in Jewish tradition in the same way that Christmas is for Christians - just happens to fall at the same time of year. So we don't want to try and magnify it to compete/substitute for Xmas - it just wouldn't work. Passover is the big one for us and we always get a large crowd together for that which makes it feel lovely. This year we did our Seder over Zoom!

Things that we have done and felt fine about - "secret Santa" gift exchanges at work, visiting a friend's house and helping to decorate their tree, work Xmas do.

Things we have done and felt didn't work for us/won't do again - carol concert, gift giving in our home on Xmas morning, certain movies that empasise the universality of Xmas/how bad it is when people don't celebrate it

Your feelings might change over time, it's happened to us too. I wanted to fit in a lot more as a teen and at uni - I was even a main part in my school nativity play lol It's a balancing act.

We are multifaith but only I have a faith, DH is agnostic and if anything has just adopted some of our (Muslim) traditional practices really. We have a Christmas dinner of some sort but it's not a huge deal, either we host my family (which is just my parents and siblings as have no other local extended family) or my parents host us all. DH's (separated) parents are both NC with us and we've never been invited for Xmas dinner to any of his other relatives. We normally see one side of his family in one of his relatives houses as a big Xmas party get together either before or after Xmas and sometimes we also go out for an Xmas meal with some of them usually after Xmas. His other side of the family is small so we just do a low key visit or two either here or at theirs at some point over the Xmas season. Our DD gets a stocking from us and Xmas gifts off whoever buys her but she is only 2. She is being brought up Muslim but I'm not conservative at all in my practice. We will do Santa as a game, which is what my (Muslim) parents did with me and my siblings, rather than pretending it was all real. We have an Xmas tree but haven't used it since DD was born as not really got space for it anymore. We do Xmas cards. Both of us see Christmas as a cultural tradition for us rather than a religious festival I guess.