Story highlights Jill Filipovic: Millennial "nones" have no religious affiliation but crave holiday kinship

Religious messages don't resonate, she says, but "skin-shedding potential of spring" does

Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and Nairobi, Kenya, and the author of the forthcoming book "The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness." Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) When I moved to Nairobi from New York a year and a half ago, one of my biggest fears (second only to the prospect of my cat dying in transport or getting lost somewhere over the Atlantic) was that I wouldn't find the kind of community I had in New York: friends tied together so tightly we were like family, bolstered by a large extended network of kind, fascinating men and women.

Jill Filipovic

These carefully built connections with people I loved meant no holiday was spent alone if I didn't want it to be. Easter, for years, meant a long wine-soaked Brooklyn brunch with whatever friends were in town and then a walk in the newly warm springtime sun.

Marking holidays such as Easter with particular traditions is a funny thing to care about if you are, like many of my millennial cohorts, not particularly attached to any religious belief.

And yet many of us do care, observing traditionally religious holidays in sometimes untraditional ways, using them as both anchors and trampolines -- ways to keep us moored in our cultures and family histories as well as jumping-off points to discard what does not serve us or feels ill-fitting to our values and beliefs.

We are, many of us nonreligious millennials, still on the hunt for something fundamentally human: community, connection, devotion. Something like church, without the church part.

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