Merry Christmas from an Atheist!

Call me sacrilegious: I am an atheist who adores Christmas. Not only do I decorate my apartment within an inch of its life and spend ridiculous amounts of time fashioning festive cookies, but I happily attend church on Christmas eve. (I am a sucker for the 11:00 candlelight service, which is absolutely ethereal. Sadly, no one in my family shares that enthusiasm.)

My tree at dawn. And yes, it’s a real tree.

One year I came up with the brilliant idea of church hopping on Christmas Eve. Where else, I thought, can you hear top-notch music in splendor for free? For aesthetic reasons, I only hit historical churches in New York—those listed in the U.S. Register of Historic Places: St. George on Stuyvesant Square (incidentally, the site of the wedding at the beginning of The Group by Mary McCarthy), St. Mark’s in the East Village, St. Bartholomew on Park Avenue, ending at Grace Church in the Village. (You might also notice that these are all Episcopal churches, where the aesthetic is Downton Abbey and the sermons mercifully brief.)

So why am I so enamored with Christmas? Well, I guess that might have something to do with the fact that I didn’t grow up celebrating it at all. Though my mother had been baptized in an evangelical church in Taiwan and considered herself largely Christian most of her life (my father’s faith was never clear to me), we didn’t celebrate Christmas and never exchanged presents. It was just another drab day in the drab burbs of drab Houston.

My childhood Barbie repurposed as the angel.

But I am not in a mood to probe the deprivations of my childhood and how that shaped me into a Christmas militant or open some other can of worms about the misappropriation of religion. Suffice it to say, this heathen isn’t waging a war on Christmas. I’m happily succumbing to its seductions.

As you can see, I can’t help myself:

Everyone is decked out, including the Buddhas.

MERRY! MERRY!

Always,

Vivia