Questioner: Why don’t we celebrate Christmas?
Huzoor (rh): Well, because you can’t celebrate the days of every religion. You follow Islam, so you follow the days of Islam to be celebrated. Otherwise it will be impossible for you to cope with the celebrations of all the religions of the world. Why not Holi of Hindus and so many other traditional days of celebration of other religions? So because we belong to Islam and because Christmas is a religious celebration, not just an ordinary celebration, so we don’t participate in that. But we are not too narrow-minded. If they are Christian friends, we do send them presents and there is no harm in it. If they invite us to a bite of turkey, there is no harm in eating of the turkey or sharing their Christmas cake or even presenting some gift to some Christian friend, there is no harm in such things. But it being a religious affair, as such you should not celebrate it because your religion is not Christianity, it is Islam. Got it? Good. You see there was one young boy here in England who when I came here, after two years perhaps, there was Christmas and just by way of joking I asked him, did you also celebrate Christmas? The answer was a positive yes, we did. I said how? The rest of the jokes has to be told in Urdu because otherwise in English it will lose its meaning and charm. So I said, how did you celebrate Christmas? He said that my mother’s friend had given birth to two children, so I invited them over for dinner. You know, now this can’t be translated in English, so some Ahmadi boys and their families have been celebrating a sort of Christmas of course.
