Christmas

Christmas marks two distinct moments in Sugar’s writing: a family outing that prompts her young children to dwell on Jesus’s death, and a correspondent’s decision to reconsider a traditional family gathering in light of her brother’s treatment of their parents. The holiday is neither only a religious observance nor simply a ritual of reunion. In these accounts, it brings the realities of suffering and family obligation into sharp view, and makes room for choices that the usual seasonal scripts might otherwise obscure.

A pageant and a history lesson

Nearly two years before writing about the pageant, Sugar took her children to a Christmas production at a large Unitarian church in their city. The event reenacted the birth of Jesus. She brought them not to initiate them into religious belief but to explain the holiday’s history beyond Santa Claus. They were four and nearly six, and their questions began in the car, before the performance: they wanted to know who Jesus was.

Sugar had little religious education to draw on. Her mother had left Catholicism and rejected organized religion as an adult, so Sugar had not grown up with formal instruction. Still, she explained the broad story: Jesus’s birth in a manger, his teaching about compassion, forgiveness, and love, his crucifixion, and the belief that he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. The account was intended to introduce the children to the holiday’s religious history, but the part that seized their attention was not its promise of salvation or its teachings.

Afterward, they asked to hear about Jesus repeatedly—sometimes ten times a day—and kept returning to his death for months. They wanted the brutal details: his flogging, humiliation, crown of thorns, and crucifixion. Sugar found herself recounting them while hurrying through the aisles of the upscale organic grocery store where the family shopped; other customers turned to stare. Christmas’s familiar story thus entered an unceremonious setting, where the children’s insistence made its violence impossible to treat as a distant or decorative detail.

The children’s view of the story

The children were both horrified and fascinated. They did not yet understand the crucifixion within a religious framework, and they were not especially interested in Jesus’s divinity or resurrection. They encountered the story first as a human ordeal: a man was nailed alive to a cross and suffered for a long time. Their response made the distinction between the story’s religious meaning and its physical events especially clear. The doctrine of resurrection did not erase the suffering they had just heard described.

Their questions turned that suffering toward personal relationships. Sugar’s son wondered whether Jesus’s feelings had been hurt by the people who mistreated him; her daughter wanted to know where his mother was. The children’s attention moved from the pageant’s account of a holy figure to a vulnerable person who had been treated cruelly, and to the family member who might have been present. Christmas becomes significant here through the children’s way of hearing the story: they ask not what the event proves, but what it felt like and who cared for him.

A family gathering under strain

In a separate letter, Christmas is the setting for a conflict in the present tense of family life. A woman who wants her brother out of her life explains that her parents continue to let him back into their home after he mistreats them. They have sometimes refused his calls and barred him from the house for a few days, but he returns without apologizing or acknowledging what happened. The correspondent describes the harm as extending beyond insults: her brother has used her parents’ credit cards and bank accounts to commit fraud, leaving their credit ruined. Because they will not press charges, the damage remains unresolved.

The annual family Christmas gathering makes the correspondent’s divided loyalties concrete. She loves her parents and says she will do whatever they want, but she cannot bear to sit with someone who has called her mother a degrading name and repeatedly hurt them. At the same time, she feels unable to exclude her brother while her parents continue to admit him. The letter, she acknowledges, has become a long account behind what began as a simple question about Christmas. Her anger is not merely abstract: while writing, she has to leave the computer to calm herself because her fingers are shaking.

A different plan for the holiday

Sugar advises the correspondent to separate love for her parents from participation in their continuing accommodation of her brother. She urges her to tell them that she loves them, make a plan to see them at Christmas and afterward, and refuse to take part in events involving him. If that choice means spending Christmas alone, Sugar says, it should still stand. The holiday need not require the correspondent to accept her brother’s presence as the price of remaining connected to her parents.

The advice also reaches beyond the holiday table. Sugar is concerned about the brother’s children, who are cared for by their mothers and grandparents much of the time but remain partly in their father’s custody. She suggests that the correspondent work with the children’s mothers, and possibly the grandparents, to explore ways of limiting his contact with them. Christmas, in this exchange, is therefore not a resolution of the family’s larger crisis. It is a point at which the correspondent can begin acting on what she already knows about the harm, while trying to preserve relationships with her parents and remain present in her niece’s and nephew’s lives.

Two forms of attention

The pageant episode and the family letter give Christmas different narrative work. In the first, the holiday’s religious story is retold through children who fix on pain rather than doctrine, asking about Jesus’s feelings and mother. In the second, a customary family gathering threatens to conceal or repeat harm unless one person changes how she participates. Sugar’s accounts do not make the season a simple emblem of comfort or reconciliation. They show its capacity to expose what ordinary routines can leave unexamined: the bodily reality inside a sacred story, and the costs of preserving family togetherness when someone is being hurt.