Christmas, 2025

from Multi Faith Writers Take on the Holidays

Photo by David Monje on Unsplash

It was a tremendous privilege and pleasure to get to read at the Dalton Creative Arts Guild last night, part of the event “Multi Faith Writers Take on the Holidays.” Thanks upon thanks to Dana for including me, and to Sarah, Les, and Eric for their words and great wisdom. I began thinking about what I was going to write and ultimately share about six months ago, when Dana first mentioned it to me. The idea was that writers of different spiritualities would share work dealing with the holidays. Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish. Here’s what I wrote (and read last night.) I guess it’s an essay, though when I first started writing it, it came to me like a standup routine. It’s called “Christmas, 2025.”

Christmas, 2025

There are 2.5 billion Christians in the world. I looked it up. Most of them live within about a five-mile radius of here. Of those 2.5 billion Christians, in terms of: “The Christian Most Suited to Discuss the Tenets of the Faith in Front of an Audience,” I’m exactly 2.5 billionth in the line of succession. That’s right, 2,499,999,999 other Christians were busy tonight. So here I am and I’d like to start by thanking Dana for including me in this reading and then to at least acknowledge her shockingly terrible luck. And if it ain’t luck, if there’s some Divine order to this, all I can say is that God has a weird sense of humor.

Now that I’m here, I’d like to confess something. We Christians talk about confessing all the time and it’s not so much that we feel we need to confess anything. If we call ourselves Christians in the first place, it means we’ve already made the Big Confession to the Man Upstairs and we’re square. Our main thing now is to get you to confess. And if you feel like you’re a pretty good person without much to apologize for, well. You should know that we think not. Actually, we think God thinks not. And you’re definitely going to hear about it. Not from Him. From us.

That said, I confess that one way Christianity has co-opted the way I think is that whenever I talk about my faith in front of anybody else, which is incredibly rare, I hear a little voice—angel or demon, I’m not sure what—that says, “If, at the end of this, at least one person doesn’t confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, then when you get to Heaven, St. Peter is going to punch you in the balls.” Heaven, I’m afraid, will be populated with theo-bros and all the skads of souls they’ve won for the Lord. And there I’ll be, if I make it: roasting a can of beans over a campfire in the switching yard of Heaven’s Hell’s Kitchen.

Do me a favor, though. If, after this, you do wind up confessing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, please let me know. In fact, write it down on a piece of paper and sign it and give it to me. I’ll keep it in my wallet for the rest of my life. It’d sure be nice not to have to wear a jockstrap and a cup when I enter Paradise.

Well, it’s Christmastime. You can tell by the massive uptick in SUV’s with netted pine trees bungeed to their roofs. Like decent folks in loafers suddenly turned Viking, went on a raiding party, and captured the Princess of the Woods. In fact, we’re halfway through Advent right now. Advent, a month out from Christmas, a time in which we make wreaths from the leftover tree shit wedged in our SUV luggage racks. To my Jewish friends, on the topic of candles: We got ‘em too. Not as many. But we got ‘em. We stick our candles in the Advent wreaths, three purple candles and one pink, and nobody knows why the one candle is pink and the other three are purple. Somebody up to their necks in Christian theology could tell you. By comparison, I’m halfway up my bootheel in Christian theology, and at that depth, the answer is, “Because we ran out of purple candles.” There’s a big, white candle too. That goes in the middle of the wreath, and we light that one on Christmas Eve. The Christ candle it’s called, the original birthday candle.

I’m coming into Christmas this year about as unsure of the reason for the season as I’ve ever been. Here’s the story I grew up with: God made the world and he loved it. And then he made us and he loved us and we loved him back but, pretty quick, we found out we loved apples more. So, we got the boot from the Garden and bopped around the world for a long time, building the Pyramids and starting wars and a bunch of other stuff. But things between God and us were not great. Like, “Remember the snake?” God wanted to set things right, which meant a holy field trip to a virgin’s womb. And Mary delivered the Chief of the Universe as a human baby and wrapped him in swaddling clothes—which I take to mean the muddy hem of her own robe—and put him in a feeding trough in a barn because there was, of course, no room in the inn.

And that was Christmas, the beginning of a revitalization of love. And it meant we had a job to do. That love, the love of God, was supposed to come through us and it was supposed to look like feeding hungry people and visiting lonesome neighbors and welcoming immigrants and giving our own sweatshirts to anybody who needed them, even if the people who needed them would gouge out our eyes and shit in the sockets if given the chance.

This Christmas, I expect a baby wrapped in a Kevlar vest and a tactical helmet. The Savior of the World but Mostly America who, in about 33 years, will rumble down the national mall atop a tank, bulldozing the cherry trees, the petals and branches of which would otherwise make a fine path for a humble god on the back of a donkey. Here comes the god of the victors, the vanquishers, the conquerors, the champs. And he’s here to complete his mission: Crucify his enemies. Brown folks and poor folks and people with disabilities and women journalists and anybody from Chicago, all zip-tied together, dragging along their own electric chairs. What gifts will today’s wisemen come bearing? A golden shitter, an AR-15, and a fifteen-year-old. There are the shepherds too, manger-side. And here’s something else I looked up. The word, “pastor.” Besides “in charge of a church,” the word means herdsman. You know, like a shepherd. And these herdsmen, at this manger, do look a hell of a lot like today’s Christian pastors.

To be sure, I bet there are some pastors who, if you asked them, might repudiate the notion of Jesus the grand-ass-kicker, the bullet-proof-battle-hardened-squared-off god all set to throw nail-scarred hands with Somali immigrants and homeless people. But that’s if you asked them. And that’s the problem. You have to ask them.

Now here’s me: A Rust-Belt Yankee in the modern South. A genetically pre-disposed anti-gentleman. A fish-man so far out of water that people are liable to ask, “What’s water?” I write short stories in church instead of listening to the sermon because the Muse tells the real truth in sackcloth and ashes. There’s more Gospel in Nelson Algren, Lucia Berlin, and Raymond Carver then there ever was in Lewis, Macdonald, and Tolkien. I’m inspired by midnights, flophouses, used syringes, tents under train trestles, and the steel hides of Great Lakes freighters slipping through the locks.

I drink cheap beer and cheap whiskey, because that’s what I can afford. I love filthy jokes and I look at porn too much and I’m bad with money and I go fishing when I should spend time with my kids. I have depression and I hate myself most days, and I cut myself sometimes and I’ll show you the scars if you want. I’ve never yet tried to kill myself, but I sure as hell know how I would. In most any given moment of most any given day, I’m secretly, quietly drowning.

I have no friends in high places, no cronies to go my bail, no layers of social capital under which I could hide my fuckups. I haven’t the politics, the wealth, nor the theological dexterity to kneel at the altars with the theo-bros. The only thing I’m sure of is that with each passing Christmas, my capacity to destroy myself expands and my ability to repair all that I’ve torpedoed recedes a little further beyond an already impossibly distant horizon. There isn’t a church in America right now where I could fit in completely.

Christianity used to be a religion for losers. A haven. How else would I have found it and why did it ever mean anything at all to me in the first place? It was supposed to be a sanctuary of hope for the rank fools, the shit-headed embarrassments to their families, the fat-lipped knuckleheads, the reeking slackers, the bust-out whores, the sewer-mouthed fuck-a-doodle-donkeys, the toothless, mumbling, beatdown, gas-huffing alley cats and the rats they chase for dinner, and all of them born trembling in the gutters and bound, to a man, for the paupers’ boneyard. And in between that lonesome start and that ignominious end, the drunk tanks, soup lines, meth labs, underpasses, county lockups, and psych wards. If that baby in the manger came for the conquerors and not for them, then I’m fucked because he sure as hell didn’t come for me.