Christmas Origins

In 2007, my last year in high school, our teacher, a devout Catholic, asked us to make Christmas decors out of empty tissue roll cores. My classmates set out to work, all forty or so of them, cutting green and red papers, pasting them, sprinkling glitter on pulled cotton. Having never known what Christmas really was, only being fed historical facts about it at church—like how it had a pagan origin or something, Saturnalia and all, a celebration of the sun's return in ancient Rome, how Jesus could never had been born in December because there were shepherds out in the fields that day and, who brings out cattle on a cold winter day?—I went ahead and took a core. Around it, I wrote a long enough paragraph explaining why we as "true Christians" didn't celebrate Christmas because of its pagan origins.

The next day, my teacher held my core up in front of the class, trying her best to stop herself from cursing, castigating every cell of my body without even mentioning my name. I sat there wrapped by a roll of shame, constipated with guilt.

But after the weekend, my teacher was holding a different thing up in class, a copy of a newspaper. Turns out, her brother was the editor of a local newspaper and over the weekend, he published an editorial with the exact arguments I wrote on my decor—that Christmas was pagan in origin. She apologized in front of the class (again without mentioning my name!) as I sat there, a vindicated son of evangelical Christians.

Four years later
after depression, I left the church—
that December, my first Christmas.