How do you celebrate the holidays?

[pandora_parrot]

I'm particularly interested in how pagans celebrate the upcoming holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas are two very big holidays in America. Mabon and Yule are the pagan equivalents. Do you celebrate the pagan holidays? The "mainstream" ones? Both? How do you celebrate them? This poll was created to try to divine the answers. Mostly... Since moving out here and becoming separated from my extended family, I haven't had the opportunity to really celebrate the holidays... and since they used to be a big deal for me, I want to learn how folks celebrate such things and start to build my own traditions and such. :)

[Poll #1059206]

Comments

[ssendas.livejournal.com]

you forgot to add the option for celebrate with all your so's and paramours! ;)

(i really like having friends that are so much like me!!!)

[paradox-puree.livejournal.com]

*laughs* *nods* That's more or less what I mean by "family" though.

[elgecko.livejournal.com]

Given the mixed nationality of my extended family, we've occasionally done things for both USA and Canadian Thanksgiving.

Same thing for Christmas / Chanukah / Yule

[paradox-puree.livejournal.com]

Cool. Interesting.

[peaceofpie.livejournal.com]

My friends at the Pagan shop have a big sale day to celebrate Mabon, and that's where I'll mostly be tomorrow. I need to get a better rhythm going with the Wheel of the Year. My big-deal day is always Samhain, though.

I have two Thanksgiving celebrations that I traditionally do that correlate with US Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the anniversary of when I went vegan, and I like to honor that day as a day of Thanksgiving for the things I am thankful for in my life. I like to treat it as a day of celebration because until the year I went vegan, it was always a miserable day for me, and now it's not! Also, my friends in New York and I had a tradition of getting together the day before Thanksgiving and having a vegan potluck. We called it "Unthanksgiving" and it was kinda more of a day of mourning than a day of celebration. I didn't do it last year because I didn't go back to NY for the holiday and I wasn't really in that kind of consciousness to have a day of mourning "party"...but I dunno what I'll do this year! (So, both "both" and "other" apply to me. As usual.)

I have never celebrated Christmas before, so I don't really know how, but this year I will probably celebrate it because my housemate celebrates Christmas and my church choirs all celebrate Christmas. I always try to do something for Yule because that was the first Pagan holiday I celebrated. I'm most used to celebrating Hanukkah because I grew up Jewish. Last year I integrated a little Kwanzaa celebration into my consciousness and I got a lot out of that.

I pretty much like to celebrate as much as humanly possible. All the time. :D

[paradox-puree.livejournal.com]

I don't really celebrate the mass genocide celebration, but I think a harvest holiday is nice, and my company gives me time off during it, so it is a good time to celebrate something.

[sophia-daniels.livejournal.com]

i don't really celebrate any of the holidays. and if i do anything with people for a holiday it isn't any more special than if i did something with them normally. the holidays just don't mean anything to me... except for the added stupid of major ones taking over the world for a few months. those ones i hate!! i want to bring an end to christmas! bah humbug!

the only one i care about is halloween... and i don't even do anything for it... i just like the awesome of that one taking over the world for october.

[changelingjane.livejournal.com]

I can't answer these, because everything's different now and I have no idea how I'll be celebrating anything!

[serendipitygirl.livejournal.com]

Probably not going to this year (though I really won't know til Sunday) but my answers indicate how I have in the past. :)

[thespatula.livejournal.com]

I celebrate Solstices, but for Winter I try to be polite and celebrate according to whomever I'm interacting with. I will say Happy holidays and such and try to keep things fair to everyone. If a person gives me a gift and wants me to open it on a particular day, I will, and likewise. I'll usually go do something quiet for the solstices themselves(light a candle, etc), but then go have a big meal with friends.

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

Ideally I celebrate both Mabon and Thanksgiving; Mabon is more personal, whereas Thanksgiving is more social.

My year ends at Samhain; I'll do Yule or Christmas if invited (and will participate in Yule if it seems like an observance and not just a get-together), but for me the period of November-December-January sort of exists in what I call "Exocyclical time." The year properly begins, so my thinking goes, on Chinese New Year, and the in-between times are a weird sort of alternate reality.

[theflamecrow.livejournal.com]

I put celebrate with family since that's what I used to do...

[saelkie.livejournal.com]

I grew up with a Christmas tree that lived in a pot outside most of the year and that we brought inside and decorated on the winter Solstice... we've ended up with kind of a mish-mosh of non-religious Christmas stuff, general winter festival stuff, and whatever else seems like a good idea at the time.

I haven't celebrated Thanksgiving much over the past few years - not a big fan of the pilgrim invasion - but that's changing some because Tobi's parents celebrate it and live here. Ironically, now that I'm not really vegan I'm getting a renewed enthusiasm for bringing vegan food to holiday meals.

[mantic-angel.livejournal.com]

2005: Celebrated Agnostica. Gave gifts of holy wine and an invocation set for The Trio (a set of three divine entities who represent the laws of physics as incarnated in a trio of 10-year-old girls, from a story setting I work on with my art teacher in Australia). I decorated with mobius strips.

2006: Went home to celebrate Hanukkah. It was a lot of fun, but I didn't get to focus on it quite as much as I'd have liked to. My parents didn't get in to it, and I only decorated with the menorah, so it felt a bit drab. Had a ton of fun with the creative gifts at the end, though.

Every year prior was Christmas with my family.

I've also discovered that saying "Happy Hanukkah" with a happy smile really confuses people - the phrase sort of suggests that one has just been insulted by the typical "Merry Christmas", but the smile counters that and leaves them just faintly puzzled. I'd feel horribly rude doing it without the smile, though!!

I'm trying to figure out what to do for 2007. I've done Yule and Winter Solstance casually in the past, and I want to try something new. I'm thinking of founding a new holiday that meets the goals of what I'm looking for, at this point.

One of these days, when I'm living with someone as insane as I am, I really do want to celebrate a complete set of religious holidays, from a different religion each year. There are so many seriously interesting holidays out there that I just never really get to take advantage of!

(Yes, the notion of a holy day being sacred is lost on me. I celebrated Christmas as an Agnostic, why not all the others?)