Holidays In Your Old Religion
The holidays are where deconstruction goes from a private interior thing to a public family thing. For most of the year, you can go about your post-religious life without anyone in your extended family directly confronting your unbelief. The holidays force the issue. There is a meal. There is a service. There is a ritual. There is a moment where everyone is supposed to do the thing, and now you are the person who does not.
Most ex-religious people get the holidays badly wrong for the first one or two years. They either over-perform — going through the motions exactly as before, getting more and more depressed sitting through the rituals, building resentment that comes out later in fights with their spouse — or they over-correct, refusing to attend anything, picking fights about the food, making a statement of their absence that hurts people who did not ask for the statement.
There is a workable middle. It takes a few years to find it. Here is what tends to work.
Pick what you can attend, and pick what you cannot
Different parts of a religious holiday are different cost levels for an ex-believer. The family dinner is usually the easiest to attend — the food, the people, the small talk are not metaphysically loaded for most people. The religious service is usually the hardest. The grace at the table sits in between.
A useful exercise, before the holiday season hits: write down the specific events you would normally attend, and rank them on a one-to-five scale of how hard they would be for you to sit through honestly. Then, with your spouse if you have one, decide which ones you will go to and which ones you will skip. This is a planning move, not a rebellion. You are not refusing the family. You are picking the parts you can do without pretending and skipping the parts you cannot.
For example: "We will come for Christmas Eve dinner, but we will skip midnight Mass." "We will come for Passover seder, but we will not be at shul the next morning." "We will come for Eid dinner, we will not be at the mosque." Most families can absorb this if it is presented matter-of-factly and without a speech. The mistake is going to all of it grudgingly and then exploding, or skipping all of it and then justifying yourself in the family group text.
Communicate before the day, not during
The worst time to tell your mother that you are not going to church on Christmas morning is on Christmas morning. Tell her in November. Tell her in writing if you have to. Give her time to be sad about it on her own timeline, instead of in front of the rest of the family on the day she has been looking forward to for months.
A good script: "Hi Mom, I want to talk to you about Christmas before it gets here. I want to come for Christmas Eve dinner and stay over and do morning with the family. I am not going to be at the church service this year. I have been thinking about my faith for a while and I do not want to keep going through the motions in a place that means as much as it does to you. I am not making a statement against the church. I am just being honest about where I am. I love you. I am still going to be there for the parts I can be there for."
Note what is happening here. You are not asking permission. You are also not picking a fight. You are telling her in advance, in a way that makes the day itself less likely to be a flashpoint. She may still be sad. She may still try to talk you back into going. You can hold the line without making it a fight: "I have thought about it. I am not going this year. Let’s have a good Christmas Eve."
What about the kids and the holidays
For ex-religious parents, the holiday question gets sharper because the kids are part of it. Do you let your daughter participate in the church Christmas pageant because the grandparents want her to? Do you take your son to the Pesach seder at his grandfather’s? Do you bring your kid to the mosque for Eid even if you have not gone yourself in years?
A general principle that works: kids can participate in the cultural and family side of grandparents’ holidays without being indoctrinated into the doctrinal side. A kid can be in the Christmas pageant and learn the songs without being told they are going to hell if they do not believe. A kid can be at the seder, ask questions, and learn the family history without being told the literal historicity of the Exodus is required for them to be a good person. A kid can be at Eid without being told that the kids on the other side of town are kafir.
The line you are protecting is not "no exposure to religion." That line is unrealistic and probably not even desirable. The line you are protecting is "no fear-based or shame-based content delivered to my child without my consent." That is a reasonable line that most extended families can respect if you communicate it clearly. And the kids, exposed to multiple traditions in a non-coercive way, usually come out fine. They tend to develop a healthy interest in religion as a cultural phenomenon and a reasonable resistance to high-pressure recruitment.
Build new traditions on purpose
A specific kind of grief shows up around the holidays for ex-religious people, especially in the first few years out. The old rituals are gone or hollowed out, and there is nothing yet in their place. The day feels strange. The week feels long. You miss the structure even when you no longer believe the content.
The fix is not to wait for new rituals to emerge. It is to build them on purpose. A specific morning walk on Christmas. A specific food you cook only on the equinox. A specific movie you watch every New Year’s Eve. A specific letter you write to yourself every December 31st. The content does not matter. The repetition does. Rituals work because they repeat. A tradition is just a thing you have done in the same place at the same time three years in a row.
You can also keep the secular shape of the religious holidays you grew up with — the food, the gathering, the time off, the music — and let the doctrinal content slowly become a faint echo. Many ex-religious families do exactly this and end up with holidays that mean more to them than the original ones did, because they are no longer carrying obligations they do not believe in.
A note on the first holiday after a hard exit
If you have just gone through a hard exit — a disfellowshipping, a major family rupture, a divorce, a cutoff — the first holiday season is going to be brutal. You are going to feel the absence of the people who are not at the table. You are going to compare this year to last year and find this year missing something. You are going to be tempted to either drink your way through it or hide under the covers.
Plan for this. Do not be alone for the worst day. Get a friend to commit, in advance, to spending the day with you, even just on the phone. Get out of the house. Do something physical — a hike, a long walk, a workout. Have a meal you cooked or that you went out for, not a frozen dinner. Build the day deliberately so that you have a sequence of small good things to walk through, even if your nervous system is not capable of feeling any of them at full strength.
It will not always be this hard. The first holiday after the exit is the worst. The second one is bad in a different way. The third one is usually noticeably easier. By the fifth one, in many cases, the new shape of the holiday has become its own thing, and the old shape is something you can think about with grief that no longer ruins the day. Get through the first ones any way you can. The future is not as bleak as the first year suggests.
Not therapy. Personal advice. Elder X is not a licensed therapist. This is honest writing from someone who has walked the road and sat with people on it.
Other Pieces of After
When the family stops calling
For people whose family has cut off contact, formally or quietly, after they left their religion. The grief, the confusion, and what to do when the people who said they loved you stop showing up.
Funerals and weddings in your old religion
For people who left their religion and have to attend a funeral, wedding, baptism, or bar mitzvah inside that religion. How to be present, be honest, and be the person you actually are now.
Raising kids without religion
For parents who left the religion they were raised in and now have to figure out what to teach their kids about death, ethics, meaning, and the grandparents who still believe. Practical, honest writing.
If You Came Out Of...
Pages written specifically for people leaving these traditions.
Leaving the Catholic Church
For ex-Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and people walking away from the church they were raised in. The guilt machinery, the family Mass, the saints you still half-believe in, and what comes next.
Leaving the LDS Church
For people who left the Mormon church or are in the middle of leaving. The temple, the family, the testimony you no longer have, and what comes next. Honest writing from someone who walked it.
Leaving Orthodox Judaism
For people who went off the derech (OTD) from Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox, Yeshivish, or Modern Orthodox communities. The shidduch system, the language, the family, and the immigrant-style transition into a wider world.
Want to Talk?
Tell me what you grew up in, what you are walking through right now, and what you want for the next year. Be as specific as you can. I read every message myself.