What to Do About Christmas?

I don't know what to do about Christmas this year.

I've never been into buying or receiving gifts; of the 5 "love languages", Gifts is 4th down on the list.  Gifts aren't very important to me, so buying gift for others during this time of year just feels like giving in to the consumerism of Christmas.

When we were first married, Mc and I found a way to make the holiday season more about Christ.  We don't have a Christmas tree, we have a nativity set that we set up and then put the Christmas presents under it.  We limited the number of gifts that we give our children to three each to symbolize the three gifts Jesus got from the wise men.  And we are going to teach our kids that the story of Santa isn't real, and we'll teach them where that tradition came from and why so many people like it.

But this is the first Christmas season where I'm no longer a Christian and I'm not even a theist, and so the Jesus part of Christmas doesn't resonate with me anymore.  I respect that it's important for a lot of people, and Mc is still a Christian, but the Christmas season no longer has a personal meaning for me.  And yet I certainly won't go the secular route and have Christmas be all about Santa and reindeer and jingle bells, because I've never liked that stuff to begin with.  So I'm wondering what I could do during this time of year that has some meaning for me.

I'm playing around with the idea of celebrating winter solstice somehow.  Winter solstice marks the darkest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, and every day after that gets lighter for longer until it peaks at the summer solstice, and many cultures around the world used to celebrate the winter solstice to mark the start of lighter days to come.  That's how Christmas came about anyway: Christians sought to replace the "pagan" winter solstice celebrations with Christian ones, and since they believed Jesus was the light of the world, they decided his birthday should take the place of the winter solstice celebrations (some pre-Christian solstice traditions have survived throughout the years, like the Yule log).

With a little bit of research and creativity I think I can find a way to make this December season meaningful to me, either by doing something separate or by combining it with Christmas somehow.  Just something lighthearted and fun.  Mc and I will talk about what we want to do as a family to incorporate my current beliefs with his, if anything.  Mc still gets time off of work around this time and we get to visit out-of-state family, and that's still going to be nice.