The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2 page)

Chapter 2
Revenge of the Christmas Spirit

N
EAL
P
OLLACK

Around the time that my son opened a gift to reveal a SpongeBob SquarePants edition of Connect Four, bleating out, “But I already have one of these!” I reaffirmed my sacred lifelong vow to hate Christmas. Yet I’d married a woman who’d grown up celebrating the holiday, so every year it was the tree with the needles that I’d be vacuuming up until April, the endless fretting at monstrous chain stores, the baking of the Santa cookies, the putting out of the Santa cookies, the scolding the dog for eating the Santa cookies, and—my only addition to the proceedings—the watching of
Meet Me in St. Louis
on Christmas Eve, whether drunk on wine or not. And all throughout, it was Santa this, Santa that, we have to hide the goddamn gerbil so the boy thinks it’s from Santa. Beyond all the terrible music and hideous sweaters and relentless spread of phony good feelings throughout the land, Santa, the cheesiest, most overcommercialized mythological figure in human history, bothered me the most about Christmas. And yet I had to
believe
in him to preserve the innocence of a child who watched Steve McQueen movies and had already called me a “fucking asshole” twice.

I suppose it could be worse. My wife could believe in
Jesus,
which she doesn’t, other than giving the progressive Sunday school “I believe Jesus was a great teacher” line. I will deign to lie to my child that a fat man in a red suit comes down the chimney once a year to give him video games and Tootsie Rolls, but I won’t tell him that a hippie carpenter from Israel ascended to heaven 2,000 years ago as the one true son of God.

That said, Jesus, or at least the myth of Jesus, had some fine values that didn’t involve making bratty comments about cheap plastic toys on his birthday. But, it being Christmas and all, I didn’t castigate my son. Instead, I took my wife into the back of the house and said, “He doesn’t need all those toys.”

“Leave him alone,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and we already have a stack of unopened Lego sets from his birthday. He’s never going to touch them.”

From there, the conversation became serious. Suddenly I felt the immortal energy of Barack Obama’s Socialist Republic of
America coursing through my veins. I wanted to spread the wealth. I wanted to help people. I wanted to give those toys away.

“So, okay,” Regina said. “We’ll gather them up when he’s not paying attention, and we’ll—”

“No,” I said. “I want to give them away
right now.
On Christmas.”

“Are you serious, Neal?”

“Isn’t that what Christmas is about? Giving?”

She sighed. I had her.

“I’ll get the toys together,” she said.

“I’ll find a place to take them,” I replied.

I went upstairs to my office and, after a quick round or five of online poker, started looking for a new home for our gifts. This was Los Angeles, after all, a land full of children, some of them quite needy. There had to be some organization to serve them, preferably one within a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive from my house. A soup kitchen for homeless families might be nice, I thought, but those are always mobbed with rich guilty volunteers on Christmas. Then I found a nice apartment building for families where one or both parents are HIV-positive, located on Sunset Boulevard in
Silver Lake, an easy two-highway drive away from my house. This seemed like a worthy cause, and a nice place for Christmas presents.

“All right,” I said, coming downstairs. “I’m ready to drive. Where are my presents?”

Regina gave me the SpongeBob Connect Four and a Lego Aqua Raiders set.

“This is it?” I said.

“It’s all he would give up,” she said.

“You
consulted
him?”

“You can’t take toys away from a kid on Christmas without asking,” she said. “At least he gave something.”

“True enough,” I said, and then I was off to save Christmas.

One of the great joyful bonuses of Christmas in L.A., I quickly discovered, is the ability to drive without fearing for your life. I roamed from lane to lane freely, imagining that I was back in the late 1950s before this hellhole had gotten clogged with so many people, when the Dodgers were new in town and represented hope, when people looked upon rockets with wonder, where burgers were 25 cents, and when cops dumped people in ditches with no fear of reprimand. Those were the days, I thought as I reached my destination in unheard-of time.

I parked right in front, for free. O happy Christmas Day! It was a well-maintained, relatively newly built brick building on a busy commercial block. Nothing screamed “Families with AIDS live here,” which was probably, I guessed, the point. I walked in; the lobby was a bit institutional-feeling, but clean and well kept. This was
a place of dignity, pride, and anonymity. A foil Christmas tree, fully decorated, stood in the lobby. No presents were underneath.

“Hello?” I shouted. “Hellllllllo?”

I saw an elevator that required key access, and next to it was a locked security door. It had a buzzer, which I rang. I paced around the lobby, every so often calling out a “Helloooooo!” Briefly I contemplated leaving the gifts under the tree, like a true Santa, but then I worried that no one would see them, or that someone would see them, think they were lost, and give them to the lost-and-found. Also, I kind of wanted to get a receipt, for tax purposes.

Finally, after a while, a middle-aged black woman with a stern, social-justice-oriented gaze appeared. She introduced herself as the building’s manager and asked how she could help.

“Well, I’ve got these extra presents for Christmas, see,” I said. “And I thought they might need a good home.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“Meaning, I was wondering if the kids here could use some extra Christmas presents.”

Her expression said:
You dumb-ass white man, we already have presents for the kids here. Don’t go taking out your liberal neuroses on us.
Then she said: “Let me see the presents.”

I handed her the freshly minted junk, made by Chinese slave children, rejected by my somewhat overprivileged half-Jew spawn, and now, in the spirit of Christmas, offered to the less fortunate by a slightly hung-over unshaven forty-year-old stoner. She looked them over.

“These are pretty nice,” she said.

I’m glad you approve, lady
, I thought. Instead, I said, “I thought someone here could use them. Do you have any kids six and older? Those are probably the right ages. Maybe closer to eight for the Legos.”

She thought about this for a minute, then said, “We have a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old. I’ll see that they get them.”

“Perfect,” I said, as I handed them over.

“Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” I said, with a little tip of my Dodgers cap.

I headed for the exit.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“My name doesn’t matter,” I said. I was the lone bearded stranger coming into town, He-Without-a-Name, a daytime Santa Claus, the Doctor, saving the universe with a discarded Lego set.

She looked at me, hands on hips, and said sternly, “
What is your name?
”

I told her mine. She told me hers. We shook hands. I left.

Twenty minutes later I was home.

“All good?” Regina asked.

“All good,” I said.

From the living room, I heard my child screaming, “This stupid stupid video game is toooooooo haaaaaaaaaaaard!”

“See what I’m dealing with?” she said.

“Predictable,” I said. “I’m going to go lie down in the bedroom and watch basketball for a while.”

“Anything to get out of helping around the house,” she said.

“Watch it, babe,” I said. “It’s Christmas.”

“So?”

“So I just took presents to poor children whose parents have AIDS. What have you done today?”

Her look softened. I’d gained the most important advantage you can have in any marriage, or any other relationship, for that matter: the moral high ground. I wouldn’t be there long, so I was fixing to enjoy my stay. God bless us, every one!

“You’re right,” she said. “Go enjoy your basketball.”

And that’s how I discovered the true spirit of Christmas.

Chapter 3
The Real Christmas Story

J
ENNY
C
OLGAN

I’ve always been enthralled by Christmas—the English ideal, at any rate (where I come from in Scotland, Hogmanay was always the crowd puller). The crackling snow, the animals lying down in their stalls silently at midnight in homage to the infant king, and, particularly, the glorious caroling heritage (my favorite is the rarely sung Nurse’s Carol, joining the choir being the sole high point of a miserable year long ago working in a hospital):

As the evening draws on

And dark shadows alight

With slow-breathing oxen

To warm him all ni-i-ght

The prince of compassion

Concealed in a byre

Watches the rafters above him

Resplendent with fire

Good King Wenceslas, with his foreign fountains and strange ways, was as mystical to me as anything in Narnia; likewise the three kings, whose sonorous names and inexplicable gifts—

Myrrh have I

Its bitter perfume

Breathes a life

Of gathering gloom

Sorrowing, sighing

Bleeding, dying

Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

—gave me strange, excited thrills.

In my teens, I dressed up as a Victorian wench and took part in carol-singing tableaux at the local castle, the same one where, years later, I would get married—at Christmastime, the pillars swathed in ho
lly and ivy. (Incidentally, if you’re having a secular service and aren’t allowed to mention the word
God
, I can save you some time and effort and inform you that the only carol that legally passes muster for a non-religious Christmas wedding is “Deck the Halls.”)

One of the great joys of having your own children, of course, is sharing Christmas with them. My husband, a Kiwi, spent all his childhood Christmases barbecuing on the beach and is entirely unfussed by the whole affair, but I had such wonderful Christmases that I want to make it as special as I can. Still, how to do that without fundamentally accusing their teachers of lying—or, in fact, lying?

And it is, after all, one of the greatest stories ever told—the little baby born in a manger, far from home. It has intrigue, small children (drummer boys are particularly popular in my house), stars, angels, various animals and getting to sleep outdoors—all catnip to littlies.

But, as that wonderfully conflicted cove John Betjeman put it:

. . . is it true? For if it is. . .

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare—

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Because, of course, accepting the Christmas story means accepting a whole bunch of other stuff, doctrine perhaps not quite so tea-towel-and-stuffed-lamb-friendly. And now that my three-year-old is at preschool—a Catholic preschool, no less, it being our local—of course the questions have begun.

“Are you having the Baby Jesus?” he says, prodding my large pregnant stomach.

“No,” I say. “That’s been done.”

“Oh. Are you having a monkey?”

“I hope not.”

I find him in the bedroom with the lovely Nativity book his devout—and devoted—granny has sent him (even though he hasn’t been baptized and thus is slightly damned and stuff), arguing with his friend Freya.

“Those are the three kings,” he says solemnly.

“No!
They’re the three wise men!” said Freya, in a tone that brooks no argument.

“No!
They are
kings
!”

“Wise men!”

“Kings!”

“Mom! Freya says she knows my story but it is
my
story!”

“It is
my
story!”

“It is,” I say, “everyone’s story. It is one of the most famous stories ever told. Nearly everyone you will ever meet will know a little bit about
this
story.”

Wallace thinks about this for a bit.

“No. It is just mine. Grandma sent it to me.”

Sometimes I feel like Charlotte in
Sex and the City
, having one last Christmas tree before she gives it all up for Judaism.

I take the boys to Christmas morning mass—where my mother is playing the organ—but they don’t know when to sit or stand or what to do, and I am unaccountably nostalgic for a life I never wanted.

Christmas, for a practicing Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church. We were constantly told that Easter was the more important festival, but Easter is, relatively speaking, rubbish. Yes, there’s a chocolate egg, but six weeks of no sweets plus Stations of the Cross on Wednesdays, Good Friday mass, confession, and the Saturday vigil (
hours
long)—the trade-off is, frankly, just not worth it. Though the palms on Palm Sunday are quite good.

Christmas, on the other hand, is just normal amounts of church (except, alas, for that totally gruesome year it fell on a Saturday and we couldn’t believe we had to go again the next day), but also school parties, the
Blue Peter
Advent ring, the calendar, going to Woolies to buy your mom a tiny bottle of Heather Spirit cologne (69 pence), and the glorious bellowing of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”—a song more than a thousand years old—all serving merely to heighten the crazed, overwhelming anticipation that could only be sated by a pack of thirty felt-tip pens, graded by shade, yel
low in the middle, and getting to eat lots of very small sausages.

But there is another story too, I know, to tell my little ones; perhaps not quite as immediate, but wonderful in its own way, and it starts this way:

“In the northern parts of the world, the winters are long, and cold and dark, and people would get sad and miserable. So they have always in the very depths of winter, from the beginning of recorded time, celebrated light, life, and the promise of renewal and new birth, just when they most needed cheering up.

“And they would store food, and eat and drink and be merry. And in time different cultures and creeds passed over the world, and changed and added to the stories about why we were celebrating, and said that perhaps we were celebrating because of a green man or Mithras or Sol, or because the Baby Jesus was being born, or because Santa Claus is flying over the world—look here, NASA even tracks him by satellite (www.noradsanta.org).

“And now, like all the millions of people who lived before us, we too use midwinter to see our family and exchange gifts, and feast and be merry and carry on traditions from our ancestors.”

And they will say, “Why?”

And I will say, “Because we love you.”

And I will wonder, as I often do, why we love our children—our own children, not a chimera wrapped in swaddling clothes and found in a manger—so very, very much, and wishing that there were slightly more reassuring, less genetic, less cold scientific reasons that we atheists could give for why this is so.

And then I will probably just say, “Shall we sing ‘Little Donkey’ again?” knowing that they will immediately rush off to fetch their sweet Christmas bells.