At ten, Ayanna and Olivia had one of their biggest fights because Olivia said it wasn’t fair that Ayanna got to celebrate Christmas. Ayanna didn’t go to church, didn’t believe in Jesus, and had barely even believed in Santa Claus. She had put in no effort, so why should she get presents and a long day in front of the TV alternating between naps and milky hot chocolates? Shouldn’t she have to spend the day doing her religion?

It was one of the fallow times for the Church of the Blue Door. The door was in a stray-cat period—here one day, and open, then gone for three weeks, and when it returned, almost everyone in the congregation believed it looked different. The blue maybe less vibrant? The knob maybe smaller? Or maybe it was half an inch taller? There were enough arguments that instead of the planned church service of meditating in the barn, making a community service schedule, and praying for a kinder, smarter world, they spent a significant amount of time on an early December morning remeasuring everything, checking against the prior figures, and asking if the army would also be willing to compare against their measurements.

Early December, where the days are short and gray and to do anything beyond the bare minimum feels like an accomplishment. People needed holidays during this time as a thank-you note for continuing on to a new year.

Ayanna and Olivia weren’t speaking, and Ayanna was refusing to go to her mom’s house on their scheduled days. She told her dad that school was hard right now and she needed to focus. Antony didn’t argue, he was too busy trying to figure out how to keep people in the faith. It felt like every year people were sliced off by their nostalgia for Christmas or Hanukkah, like they went home for the holidays, listened to their family talk about how weird their faith was over ham or latkes, got asked multiple times while trying on new sweaters and socks, “Are you sure that you’re not in a cult?”

Antony felt the United States’ biggest export was cults. Racism, capitalism at the expense of the planet’s health, trucks that were so big you couldn’t even see if a small child was crossing the street, not wanting to look at the truth of any situation unless the truth benefited you, the militias in the Upper Peninsula—those were cults. He was resentful, too, of all the cults in the news again. It seemed like thin white women with ghost-blue eyes were always writing their novels about them and then going on early-morning television to say things about death and dead actresses. There was the cult that a D-list celebrity had gotten into, filled with weird sex and what sounded like a lot of pressure to do Pilates.