We are a Christmas family, but not a Christian family. My mother is a Buddhist-Shintoist. My father enjoys a good stained-glass window, a jolly carol, and thinks it doesn’t really matter if Jesus was real. It is my mother who adores Christmas. During childhood she’d spend the year saving up tiny perfect things for our stockings – a doll-sized tin pail, a bear so small he disappeared if you closed your fist around him, a fat red pencil. Some of the family ornaments date to her girlhood.
She was raised by two immigrants neither of whom believed in Christmas but who wanted to give their daughter everything. So we hang those angels despite their broken wings. The religious might say that to love Christmas without believing misses the point. But a solstice celebration of food and family still seemed beautiful to me.
