"Goddamn right we aren't," said our father, laying down his pen, bounding up from the table by the front window, already warming to the energy of his own talk.

"We're not Christians, we're capitalists," he said. "Everybody in this whangdanged country is a capitalist, whether he likes it or not. Everyone in this country is one of the world's most voracious consumers, using resources at a rate twenty times greater than that of anyone else on this poor earth. And Christmas is our golden opportunity to pick up the pace."

When he saw I was turning back to my book, he added, "Why are we doing Christmas? Beats me. Tell you what--let's quit. Throw in the towel. I'll drive into town tomorrow and return the gifts. We'll give the cookies to the chickens and write all our friends and relations and explain we've given up Christmas for Lent. It's a shame to waste my vacation, though," he continued in mock sadness.

"I know." He snapped his fingers and ducked as though an idea had just struck him on the back of the head. "We'll replace the beams under the utility room. Forget those dishes, Nell, and find me the jack."

I glared at him, hating him for half a second for the effortless way he deflected my barbs and bad temper. I huffed into the kitchen, grabbed a handful of cookies, and wandered upstairs to hide in my bedroom with my book.

Later I could hear him in the kitchen, washing the dishes I had ignored and singing at the top of his voice,

"We three kings of oil and tar,
tried to smoke a rubber cigar.
It was loaded, and it exploded,
higher than yonder star."

The next year even I wouldn't have dared to question Christmas. Mother was sick, and we all clung to everything that was bright and sweet and warm, as though we thought if we ignored the shadows, they would vanish into the brilliance of hope. But the following spring the cancer took her anyway, and last Christmas my sister and I did our best to bake and wrap and sing in a frantic effort to convince our father--and ourselves--that we could be happy without her.

I thought we were miserable last Christmas. I thought we were miserable because our mother was dead and our father had grown distant and silent. But there were lights on the tree and a turkey in the oven. Eva was Clara in the Redwood Ballet's performance of The Nutcracker, and I had just received the results of my Scholastic Aptitude Tests, which were good enough--if I did okay on the College Board Achievement Tests--to justify the letter I was composing to the Harvard Admissions Committee.

But this year all that is either gone or in abeyance. This year Eva and I celebrate only because it's less painful to admit that today is Christmas than to pretend it isn't.

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