The Road to Hell

Part II: Hunting for Identity

Every year, I go Christmas tree hunting. I don't know why it's called "Hunting" when no discernable part of it is remotely related to hunting — an activity that actually requires a level skill, work ethic and fortitude that some spend a lifetime cultivating. Christmas tree hunting requires no talent. Trees don't move. They tend to congregate in groups called "forests" and they come in all sizes. To go Christmas tree hunting, one only needs to know how to drive with a beer between their legs and how to start a chainsaw.

I've gone with the same group of friends and family every year for almost a decade. The group has grown, as people have gotten married, and those married couples had kids. Before, we'd spend most of the time starting a fire in the snow, drinking peppermint schnapps with hot chocolate. Now, we spend most of the time finding hills for the kids to sled and taking pictures in front of that year's Christmas tree.

A friend in the group, Thomas, was in the same boat as me for a long time. The singles. The fun uncles who'd throw the kids into snow drifts and start snowball fights. There was a sort of unspoken comradery between us because we were part of an exclusive club. The kind that let us stay up late drinking and wake up without the repercussion of having to take care of children while nursing a hangover.

A year or two ago, things changed, and now Thomas brings his fiancé. Since the beginning, I've been so happy for him, but I could never express it. It felt cheapened, after what I'd done. Like an apology was for me, not him.

I grew up in a conservative Christian family, in the Pacific Northwest. However, mine wasn't your typical conservative Christian family, my father wasn't a gun-toting, chaw-chewing, God-fearin' man who hated liberals and snowflakes. Simply put, he was a small business owner who hated taxes and went to bible college.

In our family, we didn't go to the loud and jolly Baptist church, we didn't go to the gaudy Charismatic churches or the boisterous Four-square churches. We went to the Lutheran Church down the street. If Lutheran church were a color, it'd be beige. If it wore pants, they'd be pleated khaki Dockers. If Lutheran Church had a favorite soda, it'd be Diet RC Cola. There's hymns and chants and talking, but for the most part its precisely the thing that a child would resent having spent their Sunday morning doing. Our parents would only be able to get us to go by bribing us with doughnuts afterwards.

The church was run by rituals. One was Confirmation. It was a small class kids took where they learned about the heritage of the church, the history of Lutheranism and the 95 Theses of Martin Luther. Riveting, I know.

What I learned was the Catholics and Lutherans really weren't fans of one another. They hated each other; or at least as far as historical examples were concerned. In a way, America was founded on the hatred they had for one another: people came to here to flee religious persecution, not in that they didn't want to be Christian, but they didn't like that the Catholics were assholes.

I'm paraphrasing here.

As far as the two religions were concerned, they were polar opposites of one another. In reality, it was like arguing over the consistency and coloring of two turds on the Bristol Stool Chart: in the end, they're both poop and come out of someone's ass.

I remember sitting in those confirmation classes, learning about how radical Martin Luther was for his 95 Theses. He walked from church to church, leaving those Theses pinned to the front doors. Our teacher said it with awe, with the same reverence of someone who had run up the beaches of Normandy under a hail of gunfire to pick up a fallen soldier. To me, it sounded more like a passive aggressive neighbor, leaving notes about how to properly separate recyclables from garbage.

But I'd left Confirmation thinking I'd just joined a resistance, a sort of revolution hidden behind the scenes. If what Confirmation had told me was real, then I'd expect religious persecution at any moment. I was certain that Catholics would start jumping out of the bushes, questioning me on my affiliation with Lutheranism, armed with their misconstrued bible verses.