Mary Alice pushed her food around on her plate with her fork. "There's nothing. And I know there's no Santa Claus, too. He's just a big fat fake."

No one had an immediate response. She'd caught us by surprise. There was no Santa Claus. How crappy is that?

Diesel finally leaned forward on his elbows and looked across the table at Mary Alice. "This is the way I see it, Mary Alice. I can't say for sure if there's really a Santa Claus, but I think it's fun to pretend. The truth is, we all have a choice to make, and we can believe in whatever we want."

"I think you're poopy, too," Mary Alice said to Diesel.

Diesel slid his arm across my shoulders and leaned close, his breath warm against my ear. "You were smart to choose a hamster," he said.

Valerie returned to the dining room in time for dessert. "It's an allergy," she said. "I think I'm lactose-intolerant."

"Boy, that's a shame," Grandma said. "We got pineapple upside-down cake for tonight, and it's got lots of whipped cream on it."

Beads of sweat appeared on Valerie's upper lip and forehead, and Valerie ran back upstairs.

"Funny how these things come on," Grandma said. "She was never lactose-intolerant before. She must have caught it in California."

"I'm going to get some cookies from the kitchen," my mother said.

I followed after her and found her belting back a tumbler of Four Roses.

She jumped when she saw me. "You startled me," she said.

"I came to help with the cookies."

"I was just taking a nip." A shudder raced through my mother. "It's Christmas, you know."

This was a nip the size of a Big Gulp. "Probably Valerie isn't pregnant," I said.

My mother drained the Big Gulp, crossed herself, and went back into the dining room with the cookies.

"So," Grandma said to Kloughn, "do you make Christmas cookies at your house? Is your tree up yet?"

"We don't actually have a tree," Kloughn said. "We're Jewish."

Everyone stopped eating, even my father.

"You don't look Jewish," Grandma said. "You don't wear one of them beanies."

Kloughn rolled his eyes up as if looking for his missing beanie, clearly at a loss for words, probably still not getting total oxygen to his brain after fainting.

"How great is this?" Grandma said. "If you marry Valerie we can celebrate some of those Jewish holidays. And we can get a set of the candlesticks. I always wanted one of those Jewish candlestick things. Isn't this something," Grandma said. "Wait until I tell the girls at the beauty parlor that we might get a Jew in our family. Everyone's going to be jealous."