Galahs at our place, feasting on the seedbed of my weed infested lawn.

The opposite is way worse: just as the vines are curling back & the nights are getting longer and colder, we're meant to bring out the colourful bunny rabbit / egg imagery. The majestic, somber dignity of Autumn is tarted up with cheap chocolate and a pair of slutty bunny ear headbands. Disgraceful!

The darkness will retreat!

Having originated from near the Equator, none of it made much sense to me, but now I live in Tasmania I understand the urge to will the Sun back to us in the darkest part of Winter. Here, we have "dark mofo", a festival of food & fire & edgy pagan pretension, which for me is just too on the nose.

Yule was an existential technology designed to keep communities & their morale alive and functioning through brutal winters. The Sun will come back, darkness will flee, greenery will return! Feast to honour the gods & use up those perishables! Come together to take stock of who hasn't perished yet!

I love Midsummer! Feast and give the Sun a proper send-off! Bonfires for sympathetic magic; "here, fire and light to keep you going until you come back!", stay up the whole shortest night; this is meaning!

So I, the bitter, jaded, spiritually barren nihilist I am, must once more find my own meaning for it.
Fortunately, I'm a sucker for a good feasting of the seasons! I see nothing wrong with celebrating, like really celebrating, the solstices and equinoxes! Our ancestors did this, and we should too!

My wife very expressly wants her kids to NOT have my anti-Christmas nastiness, and so the implication is that I must at least perform a love of it, lest I poison their pure waters with my bile. And I can't fault her, because being anti-Christmas is like being anti-puppy-dogs, in the eyes of society.

But like a great many things, all that became very complicated when I had kids.

I would like to rear my kids like an objective weirdo and nip this Christmas rubbish in the bud. No kid of mine is going to demand to sit on the lap of some alcoholic and very possibly paedophilic mall Santa!

Alas.

I'm not Christian, and my upbringing/family wasn't super great, and I'm obnoxiously against blind commercialism telling me to buy in and consume like some sort of lobotomized chattel. So my default impulse is to leave it to the folks who enjoy it, and I'll just take my paid days off.

But if you're not a Christian, then the meaning behind it all gets a bit vaguer, bit more handwavey. Also fine! Many a word has been written that boils down to "I know it's stupid and commercial but I don't care: I just love Christmas!" and truly, what blessed lives such folks must live!

Even the Christians they know the early Church just absorbed Yule for sociopolitical reasons. Christ's birthday was likely Spring or early Autumn. The symbolism of Yule and it's popularity with the folk meant it couldn't be ignored, so the Church re-wrote it. And yeah, whatever, no issues really...