During the holiday season at the end of every year, it is certain that a friend or acquaintance will pass me on the street and bemoan the stress of gift-buying and party-giving. They’ll wish me a Merry Christmas, but then, as they recall my last name, they’ll ask whether I celebrate Christmas or Chanukah. “I ‘celebrate’ both,” I say, “but I also celebrate CREATION DAY.” “Creation Day,” they’ll ask, “what’s that?”

If there’s time for a quick chat, I’ll explain, “It’s something I invented out of necessity. It’s a neutral holiday that works great for people in marriages of mixed religions (like my own) and for people of no active religion such as myself.” My kids are Jewish from my first marriage and weren’t, as teenagers, keen on celebrating Christmas without also celebrating Chanukah. There was always tension around the issue. My Christian wife at the time had always celebrated with a decorated tree and lots of gifts and I certainly enjoyed the festivities. But my kids were concerned their identity was being lost if the focus was primarily Christmas-oriented. As for celebrating Chanukah, my heart just wasn’t in it. I wasn’t up for simply going through the motions. Yes, as a teenager, I had been Bar Mitzvahed and even Confirmed at our local synagogue but religious beliefs of the conventional, traditional sort were no longer compelling to me. The problem of what to celebrate at holiday season grew even more challenging when my wife and I ‘adopted’ an eighteen-year-old Muslim woman from Bosnia who came to the US as the Bosnian War of 1992-1996 was winding down. So finally I came up with the idea of celebrating CREATION DAY and the idea caught on.

So, you may ask, what is CREATION DAY?

Well, more than anything, it’s what you make of it. It’s an opportunity to be creative. One can make and exchange gifts and handmade greeting cards, create a new religion or a new outlook on life, or create and inventive way to be charitable. One is not constrained by age-old traditions. One is free to believe what one wants, or not believe at all. Given my interest in cosmology, I felt that CREATION DAY could minimally ‘celebrate’ the original act of cosmic creation: the birth of the universe as described in Genesis or any other early cosmology, or the scientific Big Bang theory, or the Steady State theory, or one of the other evolutionary models — which happens to be what interests me. My own version of the evolutionary model is loosely based on the ideas of the Scandinavian astrophysicist Hannes Alfven and the Jesuit scientific-spiritualist, Theilhard de Chardin. I call my own theory, The Self-Made Universe or Theory of Infinitudes. In my theory of creation there is no single day: Creation is a never-ending process that extends forever into the past and forward into the future.

Philosophically speaking, CREATION DAY for me means the triumph of positive forces over negative forces. It relates to creative energies winning out over destructive forces. It places high value on the creative, artistic act. CREATION DAY for me is also a way of thinking how to unite people rather than perpetuating the fables and histories that divide them as religion, race, ethnicity, and nationality oftentimes do. Through my Bosnian and Serbian friends, I have learned first hand how religion and ethnicity can brutally divide people as it senselessly has done for centuries in the former Yugoslavia. And I think of the Holocaust and certainly of the tensions and wars raging today in the middle east.

So . . . for those of you with no religion, and for those of you with more than one religion under your family’s roof, and for those with questions about your present religion, CREATION DAY may offer an appealing alternative way to celebrate at the end of the year or as an add-on celebration during the Holiday Season.