I prefer the term Midwinter Holiday - that allows for the Christian Christmas, the Jewish Hannukkah, I don't know if the moslems have one (Ramadan is not steady in the solar year), pagan whatnots, and the whole enchilada. Even Yule really means Christmas (NOT that I was offended, at all! And in fact I truly appreciate the effort not to use Christmas as the default term...). Besides, what I like to celebrate in the dead of winter is the certainty that spring will come again. I celebrate it by giving a lot of presents and hoping I get a lot of presents... And I teach the boys about generosity, goodwill towards all, and peace on Earth, none of which I consider to be Christian exclusively.

I can't use a lot of candles (5-year old twin boys) but we do have multicolored lights and a lot of balls with winter scenes on them, severa small glittery silver stars, and a large gold 5-pointed star; there are also a polar bear and some presents, on sticks, that came with an old tree we got one year. Generally we get a little live tree from the dreaded Walmart or something on the theory that it will be bigger next year. Then they always die and we get a new one. But this year, for some reason, the boys decided to decorate for the holiday themselves, so we have little balls all over the house (one hanging from the downstairs toilet's flush knob, one on the doorknob to my room...), and Timmie got one of my prettiest vases and made a kind of bouquet with the polar bear and presents on sticks and put it on our end table... so instead of an area thickly decorated (our usual) we have some decorations absolutely all over the house. I love it. A new tradition has just been born, and we won't even have to kill another little tree!

But we also hang stockings, which really is very Christmassy, although more Santa Claus than Jesus...