Yes Virginia, Humanists Celebrate the Holidays Too!
December 18, 2006
For Immediate Release
Contact: Fred Edwords, (202) 238-9088
fedwords@americanhumanist.org
- www.americanhumanist.org
(Washington, D.C., December 18, 2006) Something positive lies just below the surface of the current culture-war
fray surrounding the holiday season.
Of course, certain holiday displays on government land are still mired in
church-state separation controversy. Some businesses still wrestle with the
question of whether to wish customers “Happy Holidays” or a “Merry
Christmas.” And some religious groups strive each year to “put Christ back
into Christmas.” But as all this goes on, a growing number of humanists set
aside December 23rd as “HumanLight,” a time for quiet celebration and
friendly conviviality.
Humanists have no belief in a god. But they know that human beings all over
the world, from pre-Christian times to the present, have celebrated the
arrival of winter as a special time of year. Because of this, the winter
holidays are, to humanists and to others, an observance that is truly
human--something that fills a human need for celebration and togetherness in
everyone.
To give their own unique flavor to the holidays, humanists developed
something for themselves. Commencing with the beginning of the new
millennium, they developed HumanLight. And today that celebration has spread
from coast to coast in the United States and overseas.
“Humanist families have a desire to enjoy the holiday season in many of the
same ways that other people do,” said AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt,
father of two. “Yuletide celebrations became secularized in the United
States in the early nineteenth century. So humanists and other nontheists
have been participating in their own ways for a long, long time. Now
humanists have a special way of celebrating the season.”
Evidence of a secular winter celebration abounds. American author Washington
Irving popularized a secularized celebration in his “Old Christmas,” a part
of his “Sketch Book” published in 1820. “Old Christmas” praises the holiday
without ever mentioning Jesus or naming Christianity. (The work is available
online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1850/1850-h/1850-h.htm.) Charles
Dickens later credited Irving as an inspiration for his own secularized
story, “A Christmas Carol” (1843).
“My family and I have practiced holiday gift giving in a humanist spirit
since my first child was born in 1984,” said Fred Edwords, director of
communications for the American Humanist Association. “Now that my daughters
are adults, they still enjoy the holidays in this way.”
Joe Fox inaugurated HumanLight as a specific humanist observance in 2001 and
has established a HumanLight website at http://www.humanlight.org/ . He and
his family, along with other families, are available for interview. You may
contact Joe Fox at the following address to interview him and get contacts
for other families:
HumanLight
PO Box 8212
Somerville, NJ 08876
Joe Fox
Furlong, Pennsylvaina
215-794-3860 (home)
201-280-1451 (cell)
joefox2@comcast.net
Millions of nontheistic people--whether they call themselves humanists,
freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, or brights--recognize and observe this
season in ways that are both unique and inclusive. HumanLight brings them
all together.
