Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated on November 5th at 9:52pm

Why Secular Xmas?

Because I'm an atheist and like to celebrate the holiday in a non-religious style. I have nothing against those who find deep religious meaning in a holiday stolen from numerous earlier pagan rituals. But it's just not for me.

What do you mean by stolen from numerous earlier pagan rituals?

Here are some examples:

See, there's a problem when starting new religions. When you're starting up a new religion, you have to compete against existing religions. One way to do that is to bootstrap off of existing celebrations. Instead of trying to get folks to abandon their existing celebrations and adopt yours, you just co-op the existing celebration. Christianity was really good at this.

Frankly, any reputable Biblical scholar will tell you that Christ wasn't both on December 25th. But, there was a long list of existing celebrations around that time. Placing Christmas on that same date allows people to continue having their celebrations at that time, easing the transition into Christianity.

Note that's there's nothing unusual about Chrsitianity doing this. It's common practice when starting up a new religion.

Why are there little crosses by some of the links?

Those are to warn you of potentially religious content! The more crosses, the more religious content you might find. Hovering over the crosses should cause an explanation to pop up. After all, I'd hate to expose anyone to non-secular material without some warning.

Why Xmas rather than Christmas?

Simply to piss you off. No, not really. It's shorter. As a non-Christian, I'm also a bit uncomfortable with typing Christ all the time. However, secularchristmas.org leads right here as well.

Note that Xmas is a perfectly valid way of abbreviating Christmas. It's not a form of disrespect. The X is actually the Greek letter chi, which is a symbol for Christ.

Where did you get the page layout?

It's called Revival.1 and is available at Open Source Web Design. OSWD is a repository of open source page layouts. This particular one came with no licensing information. So I'll treat is as sort of a generic open source sort of thing.

I like it's use of both red and green without being obnoxious about it. On the downside, it's not a dynamic layout. In other words, it doesn't get wider as you make your window wider. But, frankly, there aren't that many good looking dynamic layouts.

I also like the OS X glossiness.