Kingdom of Knuffel

I'm not Christan. I don't even have a religion.

Ooh! What do you celebrate?

Christmas is pretty firmly a Christian holiday; if you're not following the religion of it but still doing the holiday then you're still following the cultural traditions, even if the religious part is gone, if that makes sense.

Oh, lots! My favorites are in the fall. My family is mostly Jewish but we've picked up a lot of local flavor over the generations that don't seem to match what the other Jews local to our current area are doing, so it's kind of funny that way, since the traditions don't exactly line up perfectly.
Like Sukkhot, right?
The way we were raised, you spend all year gathering natural things from around where you live or where you travel, and you hope in the end to have things representing the important parts of your lives, and then when Sukkhot rolls around after you've built the shelter you decorate it with all these things, and every day you have guests over to eat in it; there's a bunch of categories you try and fill (like a newly married couple, and a family with at least three generations, and teachers, and the homeless or needy, and someone new to the area, etc) by the end of the holiday. One of the days you usually end up going over to eat in someone else's, though. Anyhow.
You spend the days getting the gardens ready for winter and gathering firewood for Last Night, and tell constellation stories at night, since you're all out in the shelter.
And the last day, you take down the shelter and you have a great big bonfire all that night; one side is the side you feed and then you rake the coals over to the other where you have drying racks set up, and everyone takes turns keeping watch and tending the fruit harvest and the fire, and in the morning you take whatever hasn't dried proper and give it to the hungry of wherever you live, and everyone takes the coals in to start the winter fires in their fireplaces (it doesn't matter how cold it gets earlier, we don't start out fires until then), and then you put out the fire and pray for rain and life goes back to more or less normal.
Of course these days most of the fruit harvest goes to fancy electric dehydrators, or gets prepped and frozen and/or canned, and only a portion goes on the drying racks. But we still do it because Tradition.
Anyhow it's probably my very favorite of the holidays! It's hard work, of course, but most of life is, and it's kind of a camping trip/party as well, even if it's right in our own yard.

That sounds like a wonderful holiday Akili! I hadn't ever heard of it before... But the whole combination of harvesting, prepping for winter and sharing meals between the community sounds really lovely. Are there many people that celebrate it where you live? You mentioned that there are some differences locally, was the way you celebrate this holiday one of them?

That's true.

OMG! I love that holiday! When I read it, I was like: I like this better than Christmas! It's so lovey! It feels more loving than Christmas!

I've heard some amazing Christmas traditions too, DC. I think they both are very good holidays that way. I particularly like "boxing day"...



Chrizine, some of it is the same and some of it isn't, and there's probably about forty families or so who celebrate it in my town, so it's a pretty big percentage of the people. The differences are mostly things like, some people only spend a single night out in it instead of every night, and if you don't have a garden or a harvest to bring in, then that aspect is really changed. Everyone does have guests over, and there usually is an attempt to do different categories of people, but the specific categories aren't the same and for some of them the important part is guests, not who, and they just have anyone who wanders by instead of seeking people out. Then how our family collects decorations all year but they're all natural items and we burn them all in the end? So most of the others locally either don't worry about decorations until about a week beforehand, when they're building the shelter, or they have some permanent decorations they use every year, and either way they don't do the bonfire at the end at all.
It's definitely a common thing to leave the leftovers of a harvest for the hungry, but it's more common here to just not pick those at all and call in the community gleaners (which is a volunteer group that comes and harvests whatever is left for them and then distributes it to the hungry and the homeless shelters in the nearby counties).
And then they have some stuff we don't do, like each morning there's a little parade before they shake a lulav and etrog at each of the different directions and say a blessing, and they have traditions of who leads it each day, and the last day they'll carefully cook up the etrog and serve it as the very last thing everyone eats in the shelter (usually just a bite or two per person). We just chop ours up and put it into the havdallah spice box, and we don't care who does the blessing in the morning, and we don't have a little parade first with extra songs or anything.

On the other hand, of my entire family only ONE of us is a morning person, so maybe that has more to do with why we don't follow those traditions. >.<

But, yes, little differences like that.

Nice! You're so lucky! My yard isn't big enough for a fish pond. Plus the feral cats would eat the fish.

Speaking of cats, we own three of our own: Thor, Boomer, and Howler. One boy and two girls. The bathroom is small, the toilet is within centimeters from the sink and the sink is within centimeters of the tub. It's that small. The tub/shower glass doors are shut. You can see there are no cats in there. I sit on the toilet...the bathroom door is locked on the inside. All of a sudden there is a cat (Boomer) in the bathroom. WHERE THE HELL DID THE CAT COME FROM?! She's a black cat, I should have been able to see her in the light colored bathroom.

Oh that's a nice surprise then with the fish pond, isn't it :) ?

I've read about Christmas being a pagan tradition, I vaguely remember it though. I like the idea of calling it Xmas :D