[What if scenario] What if all commercial institutions suddenly decided they no longer intend to acknowledge religious events such as Christmas?
This means no sales, no themed merchandise, no decorations. December 25 and most other day are treated just like any other day for all stores malls, restaurants, ect.
You'd still get non religious holiday events like mothers days, or independence days.
What whould change?
That would never happen. Those events are too profitable.
I'm not sure you understand the words "what if"
They would loose a lot of profit. FIFY
It's so weird when people refer to Christmas as religious holidays. Like, I know its Christianity origins, but Christians just stole it from pagans, gave it a different name and called it their own.
I live in an atheist country and everyone celebrates Christmas, just without all the religious bullshit.
What atheist country do you live in?
Czechia.
Christmas at this point isn't even a religious holiday.
Do people worship Santa Claus? I mean, they do sort of worship the God Consumerism, to be fair.
However, the baby Jesus ain't got shit to do with the modern version of this holiday.
Just ask the fucking Saturnalia trees we break out every year. The holiday has absolutely loads of pagan traditions present in it because when Constantine shouted out "Hey all you Romans, all of you are Christian now!" didn't actually work very well. So they started mashing existing traditions onto the "new" tradition. So the Romans just took Saturnalia and slapped Christmas on it and was like "this totally tracks!" to get people to accept Christianity as the new religion of the Empire.
I mean, holy fuck, middle eastern winters are far too cold for a baby in a manger. Kid would have frozen the fuck to death.
Whole thing is a joke anyway from fucks who don't know shit about history because the only book they bothered to ever try to read (and they only really read what their preacher told em) was the Bible.
If they read (and believed) other books, they would and should be embarrassed.
Most of the people you're thinking about as a problem haven't read the Bible either. They'd think the stuff Jesus said was commie, bleeding-heart, socialist stuff (because it is)
A bunch of conservative Christians would be extremely mad
Christmas isn't a religious holiday. Christmas today has basically nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, just like how Halloween isn't celebrating the Grim Reaper. It's just a fun and festive time.
I always considered it the mid-winter celebration. A time to break into some of the stored food (sugar-preserved fruit anyone?). Basically a way to raise the spirits since autumn harvest was long gone and it felt a long way til spring.
You're not wrong.
Capitalism forbids fewer reasons to buy things.
It also forbids stagnation, it can built a bigger and better holiday
“Target Promotes Atheism To Children”
They'd loose loads of sales. I wouldn't mind, as I don't 'celebrate' those days anyway, but economically it would be bad for loads of stores and every company that is making or other way involved in all that junk.
It's more about commerce then religion anyway.
So, they’d keep Mother’s Day? The one invented by consumerism? But abandon the other ones that drive even more sales? Does that include Thanksgiving/Black Friday?
Thanksgiving is about the only holiday I give a rats ass about. Ignore the fucked up history, ignore the bullshit stories about the Pilgrims.
I do two things on Thanksgiving. Find simple things to be thankful for in my life, and eat good food.
Yeah, just ignore and forget the genocide that happened for you to ‘celebrate’ by indulging.
Nothing more American than that.
You're right; we must spend all hours of all days contemplating historical injustice. No happiness allowed!
Thanksgiving and black Friday are not religious so they'd stay I imagine.
Thanksgiving is very much religious — who do you think they were thanking?
Black Friday though is very much corporations thanking their marketing departments.
Valentine’s day celebrates St. Valentine, St. Patrick’s day is obvious, Halloween or All Hallows Evening is all about the next day being All Saints Day. Easter is also obvious.
Hanukkah is religious, Diwali is religious, Ramadan is religious.
Pretty much every holiday that lines up with a celestial event has multiple religious holidays clustering around it.
Even Chinese New Year could be considered religious, although Western and Orthodox New Years are arguably not.
It pretty subjective I don't know much about Thanksgiving as a Canadian we have we have a differnt one then the US. I never understood what ours was even about other then turkey. So if it's religious then I honestly had no clue.
As many others have pointed out. If we strip all meaning of these events and just make the entirely commercial then it doesn't much matter if they where intended as religious events or not.
With that in mind I wonder if separating the events from capitalism might actually empower them...
Then life would be a little more boring. I'm agnostic, but I love the Christmas spirit and Halloween spirit. I could live without the rest of the holidays.
We can have these without the commercialism can't we? Homemade decorations and costumes have more value and the act of making them with your family provides the time to talk about what these traditions are about.
Oddly I don't do Christmas at home, aside from sharing a couple gifts. So its going about the city or to the mall where I tend to experience the decorations and festive atmosphere. As well as driving around and looking at people's light shows and lawn decorations.
Not sure how that would be impacted, but I would miss it if it wasn't there.
Yeah I don't necessarily buy a lot of things when I go out during christmas time, but the lights and decorations just add to the "christmas spirit" for me.
Do you live in a place with snow?
No.
We'd get non religious holidays developing / being promoted to sell a bunch of shit. Some people classify halloween as a "religious holiday" because of its roots as All Saints Day eve, but it's pretty clearly a nonreligious "dress-up / horror" holiday nowadays.
If there was no Christmas there would be some generic winter cosiness holiday (as xmas/ December actually is for most Western countries). I live in France and there's loads of "Christmas" junk but it's 99% non religious. Even compared to the UK, where some people complain about "Christmas loosing its roots", it's noticeable to me how few of the decorations or cards have any religious imagery (even pretty neutral things like stars or angels). There loads of snow and winter animals, no wise men/shepherds, let alone 'baby jesus'. France is officially opposed to religious holidays because they're a "secular state" but they keep a winter and spring public holdiays that are at the same time as Christmas and around Easter. But other public days off are just other non religious events (national holidays like Bastille day, workers rights on may day, etc.)
And in seasons like summer that didn't have big religious holidays (or not popular ones anyway), there's loads of secular sources of themes / merchandising. The Olympics and World Cup (or whatever sports your country is into) always end up filling the supermarkets with loads of cheap junk and create a shared topic to "being people together".
Another French holiday is the midsummer "fête de musique" which was created by the government decades ago to replace the dangerous (notionally Christian but clearly pagan) "fête de Saint Jean" where people built big bonfires and young men tried to jump over them (leading to lots of injuries!). Now all cities and towns and even small villages will organise some concerts or live music evenings.
Tldr : if companies weren't promoting religious holidays, they'd just find other holidays to sell stuff.
Now what happens to a religion that is, for the most part, now separated from capitalism?
Really depends on the religion. There are some religions that aren't organized at all, and are fully self practiced. They don't require things to be sold.
The religion of capitalism is a different beast though. I would say that people need things to celebrate in life though, or they tend to get very hostile. It seems to me that the more communal an event is the better the effect is on society, as people can set aside a lot of grievances for the festivities.
Huh. Well, the culture of the holidays wouldn't change in the rest of the populace, so the very first business to re-recognize and take advantage of holidays would make a lot more money than all their competitors over that period. Their competitors would all quickly follow suit, I imagine.
I mean that's possible but whould they even need to? If one company had a "Christmas sale" and other had a "boxing week blowout" will folks even care, or will they just go to what place has the better deals?
This is the corporate version of the prisoner’s delima.
And no, corporations would absolutely try to fuck over their competitors.
Then they would start losing a lot of money. Christmas is one of the biggest events. People will find ways to celebrate it still though.
Chriatmas itself is great, its the obnoxious music and decorations that go up mid October that I hate
Obnoxious Music, agreed.
But the decorations are the best part. Cultural Event Decorations add to a feeling of a season. Sure some people put them up a bit early. But not everyone is into the spooky season. Despite their blatantly wrong opinion, they can decorate how they please... within reason.
What's obnoxious are people who go after you for not decorating or not decorating enough. People who tell you what to do in regards to decorations, are petty obnoxious little Karens.
What a boring life that would be. If the goal is to be more inclusive, how about the opposite direction and be more inclusive?
Still celebrate Halloween with costumes and candy and stuff but also Holi (I realize different theme) and Dia de Los Muertos. We really really need a holiday where we throw colored water balloons at each other (apologies if that offensive). How is that not global? But, for the love of God, not Carnevale, you haven’t seen what my co-workers look like
It would be easier for workers who are religious to take those days off; currently they're often "blackout" days with regards to time-off requests.
Like what would happen if stores gave up possibly their most profitable period of the entire year? Christmas would go on via Etsy and eBay and such. It might slowly die as the years go on, but Christmas has a lot of momentum even if stores aren't selling the gear.
I would love to leave Christmas behind, but it is a huge percentage the stupid consumer-driven economy in the USA. I think it would upset the apple cart and put a lot of folks out of work for a while. I suppose things would stabilize and recover (unless riots and worse happened).
Christmas becoming a BFD was a gradual thing. It's one reason I don't care for Dickens. I don't blame him for all of it, but he certainly helped make it "mandatory fun" with his preachy novella. It's ironic, because he was moralizing against greed and now Christmas is all about greed.
Without the "on the seventh day, he rested" adage, I would not get days off. I had this pulled on me by religious bosses to force me to give up my only day off. They rejoiced when I found God.
I will never work for religious nuts again.
Lots of companies would see their stock price lower as Christmas is a major generator of sales, both with sales and themed goods.
I'd call that the shock period. But imagine that would be temporary and less bad then we think.
Eventually I'd hope for less stores that only open for the holiday season and only hire for the rush. Things could just spread out more and we'd all be less dependent in revenue created from one event. We could focus our buying power on useful things and less cheap plastic crap bought to appease old rituals.
All very optimistic and unrealistic thoughts though
Except that Christmas is also touching on a consumer activity that isn't prevalent during the rest of the year, showing others how much you love them with money.
It is a different kind of buying activity than the rest of the year, which is usually purchases for yourself mixed in with some birthday presents.
They’re thinking ahead : Prime Day and Target Day are becoming big sales events not attached to any holiday
But those days are different; it is more about clearing out old inventory.
I've noticed that seems to be happening, especially with companies like Amazon, whom I work for, aside from the money they can make from it. That said, we also have an example of that in the form of old Soviet Russia. They had actually eliminated most holidays.
I think the beauty of this line of social media is that it is so anonymous in the sense that it doesn't matter who is behind the username. It can be the most basic bitch in Ohio, a shut-in from Italy, a porn star from Hungary or a chart breaking pop star from London. As long they have something interesting to contribute, it does not matter at all who they are. No need to prove anything. Everybody can just be.
Edit: Oops, wrong post. But I'll leave it here, in the name of Eris!
Also the complete lack of context to why I'd ask the question. I could be a writer, this could be some nefarious data scheme, or im just dumb and curious. Doesn't really matter.
Really I'd just been watching somthing like Defunctland and hearing about cool ideas that failed because they where not profitable enough.
I wondered what if that happened to religion. What might that look like. How many people whould it take to stop giving a crap about Christmas for companies to just be like "yhea lets just not do that anymore". And without Christmas would the rate of those engaged in Christianity just fall slowly? Whould that be all it takes?
Probably not. But figured I'll get some alternative perspective.
Oh, butts. I replied to the wrong post. The one I intended to respond asked if there were celebrities on the feediverse.
I must admit, it gave me great confusion to read your response in my inbox. And now amusement.
No worries. It was shocking relivent for a wrong post.
They'd probably lose a lot of money, both from not having the sales and from the anger stoked by the "WAR ON CHRISTMAS!!!!!" guys
The "Christians" would commit a series of shootings and bombings.
I wouldn't be shocked at protest over Walmart not selling 20foot glitter crusted crucifixes or whatever. But I think most know the difference between defiance of religious values and non-compliance. I'm for up north though so there's a little less zeal.
Also shooting up a Walmart probably ain't the best move. Folks there are likley armed to the teeth and itching to shoot back.