I’m breaking my once-a-week rule and writing today because, frankly, I really didn’t write on Sunday. I cheated and went into the archives. So I owe you one. Plus, I feel compelled to write something about Christmas or, er, the holidays, since this is the season in which we find ourselves immersed or surrounded or pulverized by, depending on your outlook.

This might surprise some of you, but I actually love Christmas. Yes, it’s stressful, and yes, it’s overly materialistic, and yes, those “he went to Jared” ads make me barf in my mouth every.single.time…but aside from all that, there’s so much about it that I absolutely adore. And I don’t just mean in the secular, families-get-together, spirit-of-giving, lots-of-time-off-work way—although all of those are biggies, too. But the main reason I love Christmas is simple: Jesus.

I really hope some of you did a spit-take or choked on your bagel when you read that, because that was totally the effect I was going for. But, snare trap aside, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s true. When it comes to Christmas, I love Jesus.

For those of you who don’t know me, let me explain why you should have spewed coffee on your computer screen:

I’m an avowed agnostic. I don’t claim to say there isn’t a god, but I’m not willing to bet my life that there is one, either.  Ergo, I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe Jesus was the Son of God and, consequently, Jesus Christ is not my personal Lord and Savior.

If you are a true believer and horrified by what I’ve written, let me try to put your mind at ease a little: I didn’t come to this non-belief system lightly. I was raised Catholic and was actually quite devout as a child. I prayed every single night and went to Mass every single weekend (multiple times during Christmas and Easter weeks). I did all of the sacraments through confirmation. My family would regularly say the rosary together.

But sometime in high school I started questioning what it was all about. The logical side of me had a hard time fitting Jesus and God into the world. I started asking those questions that have led doubters away from faith since the beginning of time: “If God is all powerful, why does He allow so much suffering in the world?” “If God is all forgiving, why is there a hell?” “If God is all loving, why didn’t he give me bigger boobs?”

I didn’t give up on God right away. Just the opposite. I tried really hard to make God make sense to me. I started going to church more often to look for answers. I went on a weekend youth retreat (which included sitting in a circle singing Kumbaya, just as you would imagine). I talked to my parents about it. I talked to my friends. But nothing I could find answered my questions satisfactorily. So around my junior year of high school, I declared that I was an atheist and stopped going to church. This was right around the same time I became a vegetarian for six months and discovered Ayn Rand. To my parents’ credit, when I told them this, they said, simply, “Okay.” They didn’t argue or try to convince me otherwise.

In fact, shortly after my defection, my mom was at a church ladies luncheon and one of the other mothers asked her where I had been. “She’s decided not to go to church anymore,” my mom replied.

The mother, horrified, said, “I can’t believe you let her do that! Why don’t you make her go?”

“Because she’s old enough to make her own decisions about things like this.”

Go, Donna!

Besides, my mom knew by that point that trying to make me do anything was a really, really bad idea. Dave has often said the sure enough way to get me to do something is to tell me to do the opposite. A comment like “Gee, Laura, I really think you should spend more time with your horse and less time with the children” would likely result in Chama’s sale and my third pregnancy. I’m not proud of this. My epic stubbornness is probably my worst characteristic—and believe me, there are a lot of competitors vying for that honor. And, no doubt, this stubbornness is a big part of why organized religion and I don’t mesh. Quite simply, I don’t want to be told what to do or what to believe, by anyone, including God.

Nonetheless, my atheism softened, becoming agnosticism by college. By my early 20s, it had softened even more to a quasi-faith. As I stumbled along, trying to figure out my path through life, I felt something lacking and turned back to the church. I started praying again and saying the rosary. I even started going to Mass again—every weekday on my lunch break. I realized one of the things I hated about belonging to a church was actually belonging to a church. I’m not a joiner, so I had no desire for the whole community aspect of religion. Going to Mass midday during the week meant I sat in the pews almost entirely alone. I got to really listen to the readings and the homilies and think about how they fit in to my life.

It was deeply rewarding. I felt that I had a renewed understanding of the role of religion in people’s lives and the meaning of faith. During this time I also read the book Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington about his accidental spiritual journey while writing about Pentecostal snake handlers for the New York Times. In it I read something that I found so deeply beautiful, I’ve never forgotten it: “Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.”

I began to believe that. But I still didn’t really believe in God. I also became increasingly disillusioned with the Catholic Church and its views on the role of women. And its homophobia. And its stance on birth control. These had always bothered me, but I was able to look the other way, telling myself my faith was not about the church’s politics. Besides, at the time I was going to Mass at the Catholic student center on the Berkeley campus—which was so liberal it made Universalists look like Oral Roberts’ devotees. But then came the clergy sex abuse scandal and I just couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.

So I stopped going to church and saying the rosary and praying. And I haven’t done any of those—not with any real conviction—ever since.

Occasionally I’ll do a kind of meditative pseudo-prayer session, but I don’t really talk to the capital-G God, thanking Him for His blessings and asking Him for things. When I try to do this, it feels forced and manipulative. I just can’t believe that, if there is a God, He cares about what I’m thinking. Moreover, I can’t believe a god exists who picks and chooses whose prayers to listen to. I bristle when people talk about the power of prayer in healing their sick child or dying sister. I always want to ask them: “What about the mother whose sick child didn’t recover? Did her prayers not count? Did she not pray hard enough? Did she not love God enough so He let her baby die?”

This is when believers talk about the importance of faith—the mystery that Dennis Covington wrote about. Shouldn’t I get that? I believed it at one point, didn’t I? But it just doesn’t make sense to me. The fact is, I can’t square an all-powerful, all-loving, all-forgiving God with the reality of the world.

So I’m agnostic.

Yet I have a nativity scene, which has caused no end of commentary from the friends who’ve come to our house this holiday season. My friend Cy saw it and said, simply, “Wow.”

“What?”

“Why do you have a nativity scene?”

“Why not? I have a Christmas tree.”

“Yes,” she said, “but even Jews have Christmas trees. You’ve got baby Jesus in a manger. What’s up with that?”

Because, at Christmastime, I love Jesus. I love the Christmas story. As drama goes, you really can’t get much better. Here was this pregnant, unwed teenager who was forced to travel miles on a donkey (we owned a donkey when I was pregnant with Noah and I actually rode her for about two minutes—and I have to say, Mary had one hell of a journey), only to be forced to give birth in a stable, among the animals, and lay her newborn baby to sleep in a feeding trough. Any woman who has given birth can imagine how scary all of this must have been for her—especially at a time when more women and babies died in childbirth than survived.

And I love the metaphor of Jesus’ birth: that this baby brought light and hope into a dark and angry world. Because babies always bring that with them, don’t they? No matter the circumstances of the pregnancy or the birth, no matter the situation of the parents, no matter the child’s future: that moment of birth holds so much promise. It is a beginning in its purest and most eloquent form. I remember Dave and I looking at Noah’s perfect little feet after he was born and Dave saying all he could think about was all the places those feet would walk, all the paths they would take him down. The beginning of life is an undiscovered sea, an uncharted desert. And each time we embark to discover it, we hold our breath, wondering what we’ll find.

So this is what I think about when I hear the Christmas story. Whether or not Jesus is the Son of God is irrelevant to me. What matters is what his birth symbolizes: life anew. So I decorate my house and display a nativity scene and tell my kids that the most important part of Christmas is Jesus. Because I believe it.