The upheavals of adolescence silenced ’A Christmas Carol’ for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

Strieber frames his changing attitude toward Christmas as a barometer of adolescent and young-adult identity formation. The “upheavals of adolescence” interrupt a childhood attachment to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, replacing it first with militant disbelief (“firebrand atheist”) and then with a cooler, socially compliant skepticism (“agnostic”). Christmas becomes not a spiritual or imaginative event but a set of obligatory transactions—standardized gifts, rehearsed gratitude, and impersonal reciprocation (“fountain pens and shirts”). The passage contrasts genuine wonder with performative ritual, suggesting that disenchantment is less an intellectual victory than a narrowing of experience, where meaning is reduced to commerce and duty.