The Christmas of Baby Tommy

In the last week before winter holidays, my son and daughter watch at least one movie a day in elementary school. Phonics and multiplication tables fade in the flickering light of The Polar Express and The Grinch. My kids are separated by two grades and literacy, but their viewing material is the same. This holiday school experience could not be more different than my own, growing up Irish Catholic. We spent Advent in candlelight and clouds of frankincense, focusing on the need to cleanse our souls in preparation for . . . something.

When my partner and I decided to have kids, we were vague and undeclared about most aspects of parenting, but we agreed we would not raise our kids in a particular faith, since we, as adults, didn’t have one ourselves. For my British partner, church meant dry fruitcake and honking organ music; for me, it meant an institution rigged for misery. It was settled: no baptism, no nothing. When asked questions (Why does that man have a black cross on his forehead? Why is that woman wearing a scarf over her face?), we would answer with what we hoped were even, open-minded, factual responses, as though our kids were conducting field surveys. We would be their anthropological guides.

We had practice: my partner and I spent years studying religious art and literature in graduate school. I was proud to be called a “soulless Marxist” after delivering a conference paper on the economics of craft guilds and religion in the Middle Ages. I had severed the emotional from the intellectual with great success. I was an adult.