I don't care for Christmas, or at least not the way it's celebrated in the U.S. It's far too materialistic and religious, it's as though we as a people feel bad about spending so much money, so we go to church for 'absolution' to make ourselves feel better about something we really know is wrong. Like ridiculously skinny models in teen magazines, it creates a stereotype that few can live up to. Families rack up huge credit card bills to keep up with the Joneses, at a time when financially they should be saving up for higher energy bills.  

Now don't get me wrong, Christmas has its place. For kids (by kids I mean those who haven't yet started working full-time) the presents are great. For kids up to say 11 or 12 there's plenty of toys out there to buy, and they love tearing through the wrapping paper. Once you enter the working world, you find that first, buying gifts that cost more than $50 or so gets extremely expensive for a fair sized family, and second if you want anything that costs less than $50 you can probably save and buy it yourself. Even worse, you can end up buying something the other person doesn't want, but they also don't want to return it. So you end up spending $25 on a gift for them, they spend $25 on a gift for you, and neither of you use it. This just leaves everyone a bit poorer.  

Now, from an economic perspective someone will claim this "drives the economy", but that's a non-sensical argument. Buying useless stuff to move money around is equivalent to the broken window fallacy. All you really do is create more trash. Plus, encouraging the build-up of so much debt seems incredibly irresponsible in our new era of "austerity" and unemployment. 

Then there's the religious aspect to the whole thing.  Now pretending that we're a "Christian nation" is false. We're a nation of Christians, Catholics, Jews, Atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Ba'hai, and many others. Evangelicals in particular seem bent on forcing everyone to celebrate Christmas as a Christian holiday. But rather than focusing on the increasingly divisive issue of religion, America should have secular holidays in the spirit of a proper democratic republic. December 25 was of course the Winter solstice on the Roman calendar. In fact I would think it would be far easier to romanticize the idea of family gathering together to keep warm on the shortest (darkest) day of the year.

So let's have a new holiday. In fact, let's call it Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is much better than Christmas anyway, since it focuses more on family gathering, which is much more important (plus food, everyone loves food). The date of Thanksgiving need not be in November, so let's call December 21 Thanksgiving. We can have an image of family gathering together on the darkest day, treats and small toys for the kids (no buying your kid a laptop for New Thanksgiving). We can even still have "12 days". We'll call it the 12 days of the new year: December 21-January 1 can be recognized nationally as the "holiday season". Business can wind down for end-of-the-year bookkeeping and inventory. Most people can enjoy some well-earned time off visiting their family or traveling to somewhere sunny with their end-of-year bonus. Certainly December 21 and January 1 would be national holidays. December 21 would be Thanksgiving (so no more holiday in November) and Black Friday would be eliminated (it's a disgusting display of materialistic capitalism anyway). 

Santa can stay though the whole idea is really a bit silly. We can even have Thanksgiving trees. Perhaps instead of hanging trinkets on them we can hang pictures of loved ones.