In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I have never been a big fan of Christmas. In my family there were happy Thanksgivings and tolerable Easters, but Christmas was a holiday we failed at with real vigor. I will blame this on my parents' divorce. When I was 5, my mother and sister and I left our home and my father in Los Angeles. We moved to Nashville, where my mother later married a man who had the great misfortune of having been born on Christmas Day. My father, largely stoic in the face of these circumstances, was not stoic when it came to missing Christmas with us. My sister and I, who were virtually incapable of stoicism, went down like a house of cards every year. My mother was made miserable by our misery, while our stepfather recounted all the years he never got a birthday cake. It wasn't good.

Because Christmas and presents are as intertwined as ribbon and wrapping, I didn't like the presents, either. It was a bad day for expectations and heart's desires. Even at 7, I was a hard person to shop for. My father's presents were always the saddest, because they were just so consistently wrong. He sent me clothes that were not to my childish liking, and dolls that were big and artistic and creepy. The year I very much wanted a pair of boot roller skates, he got them for me. They were black. The boys all skated on one side of the convent parking lot wearing black boot skates, and the girls skated on the other side of the parking lot wearing white boot skates. There was no overlap. I was disappointed to know that I would spend another year not skating, but, more than that, I was shaken by how little my father understood the circumstances of my life. On the phone, I thanked him and said they were perfect. I never even put the laces in.

Then one year my father called me late on Christmas Eve. This was unusual, because my father's time to call was after Mass on Christmas morning. In my memory, I was already in bed, although it seems more likely tha...