I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life, and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian, even if they are not weekly church attendees.
I was raised in an atheist household, we definitely viewed Christmas as a religious thing. Most of the songs are very religious, people go to mass, etc.
For most Americans Christmas is about family, Santa (Coke's version), Reindeers, Elves, Trees, and Gifts. And then local or family traditions which may include mass, but for most, it does not.
If you'd like some stats - 90% of Americans celebrate Christmas. Fewer than half of Americans consider Christmas primarily a religious holiday. Among younger generations that is much lower (30% of Millennials consider it a primarily religious holiday). A majority of Americans say that Christmas is less of a religious holiday than it was in the past. Only about half of Americans will go to church on Christmas (compared to 82% that will spend time with family).[1]
https://www.pewforum.org/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-...
“The image of Santa Claus as a jolly large man in a red-and-white suit was the standard long before Coca-Cola co-opted it for their advertising.”
Maybe we're looking at different stats. I'm looking at the ones you linked from Pew, which show that 61% of Americans who celebrate Xmas consider it to be Christian, down from 64% in 2014.
That's supposed to convince me that it is a secular holiday?
One is not a Christian because Christianity influenced their culture.
> and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian
The vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian. Does that make "humanity" a Christian institution?
The point is that Christianity has become so normalized to you that you don't recognize Christian celebration as religious.
The fact that you incorrectly think that the "vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian" proves my point.
So? Doesn't that just serve to lessen its overall religiousness? I mean, Christmas's traditions are themselves derived from pagan solstice celebrations. Wouldn't that make it a pagan institution by your reasoning?
Much like how Christians adopted pre-existing traditions and slapped a Jesus-shaped label on them, people are now slapping a secularity (or, I would argue, consumerist) label on to Christmas traditions.
Well... [0]
> Wouldn't that make it a pagan institution by your reasoning?
Even when, say, a previously pagan practice is incorporated into Christianity, it is reinterpreted and given a new meaning, though probably in some way related to the original _by analogy_. This could be done to help the new converts better relate to the new faith and to preserve as much of the good in the previous culture as possible (in general, Catholicism gladly takes in whatever good and reconcilable there is in any culture[1]). In agreement with what you say, this does not make Christianity pagan.
Whether this is the same as the secularizing or commercializing or "consumerizing" of Christmas, I don't know. Maybe you could argue that this lumpenreligions are doing something analogous to what I just described, but this seems like a flaky comparison. Besides, secularism is a Christian heresy, so it's more like a heretical version of Christmas that's being practiced. The very idea of "secularism" is incomprehensible outside of Christianity (e.g., in Islam there is only Islam and the world of the infidels to be conquered and brought under the rule of Allah; the mosque is not an institution like the Church, just a building for prayer and thus no distinction, much less separation, between Church and State is thinkable).
[0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/refuting-th...
[1] You can give this ultimate justification in "logos spermatikos".
No, it means that I confused the terms "majority" and "plurality". If 75% of the world were Christian, it wouldn't make "being human" a Christian institution.
People are like fish, they often don't know what water is. They don't realize that their views are usually defections (of defections of...) from Christianity and therefore essentially Christian heresies. In similar fashion, Christmas is first and foremost a religious holiday. The secular version is neuters and changes the original to better conform with secular expectations while trading on the energy and raison d'etre of the original in some weird way. If you think about it, the secular version drained of the original religious content is ridiculously stupid, like all those Soviet attempts to create substitutes for the originals. Call it an idol that will one day fade because Christmas is not very sustainable when cut from its life giving root for very long.
Like "Die Hard" ;).