HERE IS WHAT I FOUND in December, written by Mrs. Prescott on the board:

Thus saith the Lord: Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

— JEREMIAH 10:2–4

By now I could pretty much figure out where this was heading without any help from Marjean, but Marjean translated anyway.

“It’s about Christmas,” Marjean said. She was wearing her black cardigan, a long green wool skirt, and lumpy lace-up shoes that looked like combat boots.

She was going to say more, but I got there first.

“It’s a pagan holiday and you don’t celebrate it,” I said, which made Marjean look crushed, but I didn’t care.

By then, Ray was beginning to seem as alien as Andrew’s intelligent jellyfish. It’s one thing to give up Halloween, I thought, but how could anybody chuck Christmas? I thought of what a beautiful word Christmas was, like stained-glass windows and tinsel, and how Ray had always loved everything about it.

“There’s nothing in the Bible that says December twenty-fifth has anything to do with the birth of our Lord,” Marjean said.

Shut up, Margarine, I thought.

I couldn’t believe Ray would give up Christmas. And I wasn’t thinking about the presents either, not that those aren’t fun and that there weren’t a few things I wanted. I meant all our family things. Every family has them, no matter what holidays you celebrate: Christmas or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, or something else that I haven’t heard of. Andrew says that his parents are always threatening to celebrate Festivus, which is for people who are minimalists and don’t like Christmas at all, so instead of a Christmas tree, they put up a plain pole in a bucket. But it never happens, because Andrew’s mother is a sucker for Christmas. She bakes these cookies called moon pies and hangs lights on everything and puts red feng shui ribbons all over their Christmas tree.

Here’s what Boone and Ray and I always do. We make gingerbread men and chocolate-covered orange peel, and Boone bakes a special Christmas cake with flattened-out gumdrops on it in the shape of a poinsettia or a star. We get our tree from Chevalier’s Christmas Tree Farm — not Jean-Claude’s farm, but his uncle Al’s — and we cut it down ourselves and bring it home on top of the car, and Boone always says that it’s too tall and will never fit in the house unless we cut a hole in the ceiling, but it always does and we never have to. Then we make paper chains and popcorn and cranberry strings to put on it, and we all have special ornaments. Ray has some from when she was a little girl: a Santa Claus and an angel with a gold halo and a sled with red letters on it that says RAY.

Boone reads all our Christmas books out loud every year on Christmas Eve, even though I’ve gotten way too old for some of them — How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol — and then late at night, like midnight, we bundle up and go for a night walk, all three of us, and every year Boone says that he hears reindeer hooves and the bells of Santa’s sleigh.

“Shhh!” Boone says, and he holds up his hand, and then I play along and say that I hear hooves and bells too.

Then Ray starts to sing. She sings “O Holy Night,” which is her favorite Christmas carol, and then Boone sings something called “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” which he claims is his.

“Mrs. Prescott is going to ask us to promise that we won’t give in to the materialism of secular Christmas,” Marjean said.

I thought that Marjean didn’t know what she was talking about. I bet that she and Bud and Grover had never been taken for a night walk on Christmas Eve. I bet she and Bud and Grover wouldn’t know a Christmas tradition if it bit them in the rear end.

“Your mom will be here with us because she’s found God’s grace,” Marjean said. “I feel sorry for you and your dad.”

Right then everything inside me just exploded. I felt like the Redeemers had taken those Christmas Eve walks that I always thought were so beautiful and holy and made them shallow and selfish and wrong.

“JUST SHUT UP!” I screamed, and I jumped out of my chair and grabbed Marjean with both hands by those long braids and tried to yank them right out of her head. Marjean shrieked at the top of her lungs and tried to kick me with her combat boots, but I wouldn’t let go.

I was sort of hysterical.

It took Mrs. Prescott and Ronnie and Paul and the teacher from the eighth-grade room across the hall to pry us apart. Then Mrs. Prescott took Marjean, who was sobbing and clutching the top of her head, to the ladies’ room, and I was sent to sit in the hall to wait for Ray.

I hoped I’d given Marjean a concussion or snatched her bald.

I hoped I’d disgraced Ray so much that the Redeemers would throw her out and never let her come back.

But they didn’t.

The next thing that happened was that we had a family talk. That’s what Ray called it, but by that time it was less of a talk than an announcement.