oh come all ye faithful by sal difalco

On Christmas Eve, after my mother and sister went to sleep and It’s A Wonderful Life concluded, I drank a glass of white vermouth from a bottle in my father’s liquor cabinet. I drank it in one go and held my breath so I wouldn’t puke. My stomach burned and in seconds I felt the alcohol warmly worming through my veins.          

In the living room, I sat on my father’s black naugahyde lounger, levered up the footrest, and watched the glittering Christmas tree as the alcohol took hold. My limbs slackened, my head felt like a sandbag. The tree lights and tinsel throbbed.       

My mother had reminded me to kill the lights before I went to bed and not to stay up too late. When I told her I would hit the sack after Santa Claus dropped by she retorted, “Never mind that, you should’ve gone to midnight mass.”        

Maybe so. I hadn’t missed a midnight mass as far back as I could remember. And frankly I had never minded the burning incense, the hymns, and how everyone was spruced up and rosy-cheeked from the nippy air outside or a few pre-service nips of boozy eggnog. Most of my cousins and friends would have been there. And I’m sure it would have been okay. But I didn’t believe in all the hooey anymore. I felt I could see through its fraudulence. Coca Cola, Santa Claus and Jesus Christ struck me as unlikely confederates, at opposite poles of the true Christmas spirit. And as much as Santa Claus was a commercially driven myth, Jesus had proven to be as much of a bust to me. I used to pray to him for this and that, sometimes fervently, as when my father first got sick with cancer. Man, I prayed hard. Even though my father was a hard-nosed and often uncompromising Sicilian, I loved the guy. He had presence, strength, wisdom—until the lung cancer got so bad he couldn’t talk or walk anymore. And then it was curtains for him, and I thought curtains for my family. Jesus never delivered, and I came to understand that he never would, and that it was stupid of me to pray for the impossible.       

My mother maintained her devotion, despite all the setbacks.         

My father, who had always scoffed at us for believing in God and attending mass regularly, would have belted me for drinking his vermouth and sitting in his lounger. But I wondered if he would have praised or scolded me for losing my faith. Maybe what had been right for him wasn’t necessarily right for me. But he wasn’t there to tell me one way or the other.        

“What are you doing?” my mother whispered from the shadows of the stairwell.          

I must have passed out.         

“Nothing, ma.”

“Go to bed, it’s late.”           

“But Santa hasn’t come yet,” I said, listening for something outside of that spinning space, eyes shut so tightly they ached.

Sal Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.