The reason for the season

Secular Americans are sometimes accused of waging a "war on Christmas".  I don't see why any knowledgeable secularist would bother.  Almost nothing about Christmas has anything to do with Jesus or Christianity.

The concept of December 25 as the birthday of a god originates with the cult of Mithra (depicted above), the ancient Persian god of light and wisdom.  Mithra's cult dates back to at least 1450 BC, but became much more widespread after it was absorbed by Zoroastrianism and carried all over the Middle East by the expansion of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC.  Later Mithraism became popular in the Roman Empire, with the god's name being Latinized as "Mithras"; he was also known as Sol Invictus, "the Unconquered Sun".  For the first few centuries of Christianity, several different dates around the year were celebrated as Jesus's birthday (the Gospels do not assign a date, though they make it fairly obvious that the birth did not happen in the winter).  Eventually Mithra's established birthday was assigned to Jesus in order to Christianize the date and celebrations which were already popular throughout the Roman domain.

The gift-giving and revelry we associate with Christmas come from the pagan Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated from December 17 through 23.  After the triumph of Christianity, these practices became associated with Christmas simply because the two events are close together on the calendar.  Another feature of Saturnalia was social role reversal in which, for example, slaves were seated in places of honor at meals, while their masters waited on them.  A few traces of this practice survive in Christmas today, such as a British army tradition that officers wait on enlisted men.

Other trappings of modern Christmas, such as Christmas trees, the Yule log, and Santa Claus, were derived much later from Germanic paganism.  Santa Claus may even be partly based on the Germanic god Odin, though the basic concept originates with the fourth-century Greek Bishop St Nicholas of Lycia (now in Turkey), and many other strains have been woven into the character.

So we have an ancient Persian holiday with celebrations based on an ancient pagan Roman festival, with some pagan Germanic imagery added on.  There's no connection with Christianity except an arbitrary glomming on to the date as Jesus's birthday in late Roman times, which has no basis in the Gospels or in anything else.  I see no reason why any secularist would wage a "war" on Christmas, because there is nothing Christian about it.

In modern times, however, something else has been happening.  As the early Christians took over "Christmas" from various pagan traditions and repurposed it for their own ends, so today capitalism has taken it over from Christianity and repurposed it as a mass frenzy of consumerism.  Very little of the activity surrounding Christmas nowadays even purports to have anything to do with Jesus.  The focus is on spending money (or going into debt) to buy things for people who in many cases may not even particularly want them, but it has to be done out of a sense of social obligation.  Some of the trappings of the holiday are fun for small children, but for most adults it seems to be dominated by stress and a sense of irksome obligation, exacerbated by the general gloom of the season and the imperative to keep up a façade of cheer and celebration (here are some coping tips for those who need them).  And each year the media evaluate all this, not for any religious significance, but for how much the increased spending stimulated the economy.  I don't think Jesus -- or Mithra -- would be impressed.