Dear Dr. Perfect,

I love my family, but the holidays pose this dilemma: my family is devoutly born-again, and I am an introverted atheist.

I want to enthusiastically abide with their faith in this time of celebration. I am not one of those evangelical atheists so eager to pick a theological fight. I don’t want to thrash them with the to-them disgraceful pagan origins of Christmas or with the various chasm of reason that faith must leap over. 

Why does the exact or even wildly inexact date of Christ’s birth matter, if the religious significance matters most? And reason is finite in a universe that certainly feels infinite.

I don’t mind going to Church with them, either, or respecting the rituals.

I would just like to spend time with my family.

But they will not let the subject of my own religious orientation go. Instead of feeling like a family, I feel like I’ve accidentally joined a cult in a red and green re-education camp. I am 25, and they act like I should have no agency, and that despite my own thoughtful feelings about the subject that I might be partly possessed by the devil and that secretly I want them to badger me into my salvation.

According to Thomas Wolfe, you can’t go home again. Should I spend this Christmas in my apartment, in my pajamas, watching Sponge Bob instead?

Signed,

A Mindful Atheist

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Dear Mindful Atheist,

Your existential journey is deeper than my usual letters. I give advice, damn good advice, I might add. But the letters keep coming.

I need a perfect drink.

You love your family but feel detached, disillusioned, dispirited, and maybe even dying.

Don’t mind that last part: I get carried away with alliteration sometimes. 

Christmas around the Perfect household was always classy. My mother, a Catholic, once dabbled in Seventh-Day Adventist theology. My father professed that he “had no time for religion” and didn’t see the point. Despite all the tears and screaming, they made our family work, and we still decorated our miniature tree and drank brandy around the fireplace as a family tradition.

One day while cleaning, my mother found a Gideons Bible signed by Pat Boone inside my father’s sock drawer. Pop was a Pat Boone fan! We never spoke of it again.

Should you excommunicate yourself this holiday season in favor of Sponge Bob?

Drink more eggnog, Mindful Atheist. And when in doubt, drink more eggnog with this recipe (1 part nogg, 10 parts whiskey).

Watch the “It’s a Sponge Bob Christmas” episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants from 2012, either with your family or at the bar.

Drink more nog.

More nog.

Nog!

Happy Holidays, heathens and faithful alike.

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Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.