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| My very first Christmas tree. |
Those words, uttered by my husband, changed everything. You see, at the time we were still Jehovah's Witnesses. We had been having a conversation where I was trying to convince him to make more of an effort to participate. What else could I do, believing as I did, that the everlasting lives of us and our children depended upon it? I was scared for him, for me, and most of all, for our children.
We were married in our church (called a Kingdom Hall) and from the beginning, we tried to be "good" Jehovah's Witnesses. But every year it got harder and harder to go through the motions. Both of us were suffering from depression by this point, and our marriage was in trouble. In our religion, we believed the husband had to be the "spiritual head," and I tried every weapon in my arsenal to try to make that happen. I was encouraging and nagging and even insulting and cruel. I tried not bringing it up and then bringing it up regularly. I prayed for him and asked others to do so. I could see that his belief in God was slipping away.
Finally, it came to a head one night at date night at our usual restaurant when he looked in my eyes and told me that our religion was killing him. It took the wind out of my sails. Over the next few weeks, I knew I had to make a decision. My religion dictated that my role would be to tell on him to the congregation elders so that they could reprimand him for his lack of faith and try to convince him to do his duty to his family and our congregation. If he didn't, I could patiently martyr myself as a long-suffering wife with an "unbelieving husband." But I couldn't do that to him. I knew what he had been through already and besides, I had been having doubts myself.
I chose to take a leap of faith, into what I believed was an abyss of no faith. Once I had made that decision, I started to explore my fondest dream. From a child, I always secretly loved Christmas decorations and would imagine what kind of a tree I would have if I ever celebrated Christmas. Of course, I believed these thoughts were wrong, so I always felt adequately guilty. However, I was going to celebrate Christmas that year, if it was the last thing I did. And I really thought it might be. In the whole lead-up to Christmas, I was so scared that what Jehovah's Witnesses call "Armageddon" might come before I got to celebrate Christmas. That's where my mind was at the time, I was in the in-between of still believing but not wanting to be a part of my faith. I wasn't ready yet to think that it wasn't true, that took longer.
But oh, that year, I decorated for Christmas! In my long-ago guilt-ridden fantasies, I had already decided that I would not have a monochromatic tree of all silver or all gold ornaments. I thought they were striking but too elegant. I wanted an old-timey tree with colorful decorations. I haunted thrift shops and bought enough ornaments to decorate a real tree because my dream Christmases had always involved a real tree. The very day that Zamzow's started selling fresh Christmas trees that year, we put one up. In a way, that simple act, celebrating a holiday that many people in their 30's are already tired of, it healed me.
I still love Christmas, I always say that I haven't had time yet to be jaded and I had been starved of that and so many other things for the first 33 years of my life. In one of my favorite books, Outlander, when the heroine had been accused of witchcraft and nearly sent to the stake, her husband defends her. When she asks what he would have done if she had been convicted of witchcraft, he answers, "I would have gone to the stake with you and hell beyond, if I must." I'm thrilled that my leap of faith involved neither being burned at the stake nor hellfire, but at the time, it really felt that frightening and dramatic. Cult beliefs are hard to challenge. Thankfully, when I went to the "dark side," I only found Christmas...and freedom.
