Only Christians allowed to celebrate Christmas?
After all the War on Christmas brouhaha, I have to admit, this was one I'd never come across before.
On another message board I frequent, a woman complained bitterly about "these non-Christians who claim to celebrate Christmas". I explained to her the basic history of solstice/Yule/Saturnalia celebrations, that the timing of Christmas was originally chosen to capitalize on existing mid-winter festivals, and that most non-Christians who celebrate just think of it as a time to focus on friends, family and charity.
She came back and said that would be like if she chose to celebrate Passover or Diwali as a time with friends and family, that she still didn't see the point.
I said that Christmas is nearly ubiquitous in American culture, and most of us grew up celebrating it, and may still have family who are religious and celebrate the holiday with that in mind -- family who would be disappointed if we stayed home. I said if she had grown up Jewish but no longer believed, she might indeed still attend her family's seder to spend time with them, or even host her own to teach her children about their heritage, if not any religious beliefs.
I said that ultimately, for me, I celebrate the solstice and don't have a problem with calling it Christmas, because after all, the common English name for the holiday where Christians celebrate the resurrection is Easter, after a pagan fertility goddess.
She pretty much ignored that, and continued to insist that we had no right to the name "Christmas", because after all, "CHRISTmas", yada yada... I gave up at that point.
I'm thoroughly confused. Folks like this want all cashiers and bank tellers and waitstaff they encounter in December to ONLY say "Merry Christmas"...but apparently no one is allowed to celebrate Christmas unless they believe in the literal truth of the nativity? 
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's the Christian name for the holiday, which means the crazy fundamentalist ladies own it! And don't you dare wish any of them Blessed Samhain! 
it was candy companies and greedy dentists that took it over.
Either way, Blessed Yule.
You COULD go back to her and have a lovely discussion with her about how a woman at another site you frequent believes Christians ought to be celebrating the birth of a Jewish Human Being of two Human Parents who died at the hands of the Romans. . . Never to be seen on this earth again.
Tell her I'm a heretic that follows the line of thought of Arius.
When she asks "who is Arius?"
Tell her to read Dicken's - A Christmas Carol.
This woman 
you know is a UU - as Dickens was . . . their entire philosophy is laid out there - it comes from Arius' philosophy.
Then tell her to keep Christmas in her heart all year long. 
<----- I bet she doesn't.
a tangent of noting that most Romance languages' name for Easter is a derivative of "Passover", I don't think I'd get very far.
Still, nice to meet someone who follows Arian thought! I've looked much more at the history of the other "U" in the UU name, but you're right, the Unitarians were originally so named specifically as a different philosophy from Trinitarianism. Intriguing!
I grew up Lutheran, which is a very nerdy denomination, and in my parochial high school, we studied the Council of Nicea and all the different "heresies" that the council set out to crush, Arianism being one of them. I find it interesting that so many RW fundamentalists don't know that the books chosen for and left out of the Bible they find so inerrant were chosen based on a political agenda, basically, "We believe X and want to stomp out Y and Z other Christian beliefs, so the only books that can be included in the canon must support our ideas and not theirs."
