Every Christmas I travel back to the regional centre in which I grew up, to visit my religious family.
I was brought up in the Baptist Christian denomination which, for those not in Australia, is seen as a lot more liberal and less hardline than the Southern Baptists of the U.S.
When I was in my teens I began listening to The Cure, reading Camus, and having some friends that didn't really fit into the moulds that the church I belonged to deemed appropriate (ie. gay).
Another event that influenced my turning away from the church was when a pastor described The Stolen Generation as "the saved generation". When I questioned my mother about this after the sermon she explained to me that there was a lot of demon possession in Indigenous communities before white people came.
With the help of a healthily developing social anxiety disorder, these things combined to encourage me to leave the church (although the excuse I gave my mother was that I was too busy studying got the HSC).
Other members of my family remained faithful churchgoers. In particular, my brother who at 21 went on to marry a girl who converted to Christianity during her relationship with him.
Eventually I moved away to the big city, specifically a very left-wing area where I can live in my little bubble of politically like-minded people and very rarely have to interact with homophobes, racists, or religious fundamentalists. So every year Christmas becomes that little bit more challenging.
Will my father tell my niece to stop picking her nose because "it's not ladylike"? Will he talk at length about how terrible it is to have a female boss? Or perhaps he'll just describe my brother's reading of the instructions when building some Lego as "not very masculine". Will my brother's wife's mother make a comment about Tasmania being "overrun by the Chinese"? Worst of all, will somebody mention the plebiscite? This year the citizens of Australia partook in a postal survey in order for the government to find out how many of us are in support of marriage equality. My parents, and presumably the rest of my family, voted no.
Well only two of these things happened (this year). However, the highlight as always was my brother's wife baking a birthday cake for Jesus and leading us all in a little sing-a-long:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Jesus
Happy birthday to you.