Happy holidays, everybody! Because it’s that special time of year, I am compelled to repeat my favorite Christmas story.

I was 5, which would put this story in December of 1974. My mother had her Nativity scene set up on the dining room buffet. Mary took a spill some years earlier, knocking off her hair. Mom replaced Mary’s do by crafting some clay over the back of her head. That was the part of the scene that commanded my attention. Virgin birth… Lord and savior… But have you seen Mary’s hair??

In that shag-carpeted space, next to the upright piano that rarely got played, where the dining and living rooms blended in our West Springfield, Va., split level, Dora laid it out.

“Some of the kids in class will say there’s no Santa Claus,” she said matter-of-factly, yet kindly. “Others will say he’s real. I’m telling you he’s not, because I don’t want you to side with the ignorant.”

I may be paraphrasing a wee bit, but “side with the ignorant” is pure Dora. I couldn’t make that up. Certainly not at 5. I was hardly precocious. And it’s the element that proves to me that the story is genuine. Or perhaps “authentic,” to borrow Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year. Dora’s sophisticated phrasing was the equivalent of her placing a watermark on my memory.

Upon confirmation of the Santa hoax, my greatest concern was whether I was still entitled to gifts. Dora was right to presume Santa was a hot topic at Rolling Valley. She was an elementary teacher herself, after all. I’d been leaning toward the hoax camp. My two elder siblings would sometimes entertain themselves by tormenting me. (My first mouthful of sour cream, for example, was a disappointing surprise as they’d convinced me it was vanilla soft serve.) As a result, I was rightfully suspicious of everything.

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While those of us in kindergarten noodled the calculations, wrestled with the impossibility of Santa’s annual task, there was an unspoken assumption that we weren’t to question the Santa story. We were getting gifts at Christmas, so why make waves?

The truth might set you free, but also deprive you of holiday loot. Oddly, during this annual Jesus jubilation, you weren’t even supposed to mention Santa at St. Bernadette’s Catholic Sunday school. The laypeople grooming us for the Vatican knew they couldn’t dispel Santa myths for fear of pissing off suburban parents, but nor could they encourage those myths for fear of our kiddie souls burning in hell. Was Santa a false idol? The ramifications could be dire.

But Dora assured me the gifting gravy train would continue to pull into the station, every year, right on time. The truth set me free and there was no price to pay.

On the other hand, roughly a decade later, every part the surly teenager, I tried to squash my baby sister’s Santa sentiments. She made mention of St. Nick, and I sneered at her ignorance. My stepmother was not happy about that. I don’t recall stepmom Robin’s exact words, but the rightful intention was, “Dude, why do you have to be such a dick?”

These years later, I’ve observed that my sister Casey, while toiling as a dead-serious nurse practitioner, has incorporated an impressive degree of whimsy into her life. Vastly more than I. I’m not saying either child-rearing technique is superior. I remain very grateful for Dora’s parenting. Pulling back that Christmas curtain early in my development has forever informed my ponderings of truth.

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Around the same time I was popping baby sis’ Xmas bubble, I was reading George Orwell’s 1984, a gift from elder sister Megan. That also informed my thoughts about truth. Protagonist Winston was plagued by truth and untruth, spending his days erasing unpeople’s paper trails at the Ministry of Truth. A new novel set in the same 1984 universe, Julia, by Sandra Newman, doesn’t offer many giggles. Told from the perspective of Winston’s titular lover, I will, however, admit to being tickled when Julia considers Winston’s obsession with truth to be kind of odd, pointless, and a drag.

If you’re familiar with the story, you know Winston is broken during a torture session at the Ministry of Love. Part of that breaking centers on a simple equation: 2 + 2 = 4. The Party taught Winston that two plus two equals whatever the party says it equals.

When it comes to truth, I find the course of my life has taken me from somewhere in the neighborhood of #TeamWinston to somewhere nearer #TeamJulia. I’ve come to learn that hard truths are sometimes only as hard as dogma might demand.

An obnoxious case in point is the currently loaded question: What is a woman? Seems a simple question on the surface, one used to ensure that Trans women are definitely not part of the answer. The question does double duty enforcing bigotry against Trans men, Queer people in general, and anyone who doesn’t fit snugly into a binary view of reality.

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I have no trouble affirming 2 + 2 = 4. But I won’t affirm that simple formula without also acknowledging that the square root of 16 also equals four. Or that negative two multiplied by negative two also equals four. Or that there are a million more ways to get to four, and that focusing on one simple formula to get to one simple answer is an insult to the wonder of the human mind.

Looking at the binary in technology, there is comforting simplicity in binary computing. It’s become such a foundation of current civilization that one might wonder if there is some piece of the natural’s world’s inherent architecture at play.

I’m no computer scientist, not by a laughable longshot, but seems to me that comfort carries no more practical weight than Santa, despite his legendary, jelly-like girth. Our technology is evolving toward quantum computing. If my rudimentary understanding of quantum computing is even ballpark accurate, it is a leap beyond the binary.

If our existence is a Matrix-like simulation, seems a safe bet it’s not built on a virtual scaffolding of ones and zeroes. But there is evidence that a simulation may be truth.

This won’t be answered in our lifetimes, so no need to puzzle it out. Though we can thank those delightful Transgender Wachowski sisters, Lana and Lilly, for giving us the Matrix franchise.

All I want for Christmas — Saturnalia? — is for Right-wing blowhards to give a couple of Transgender creators due credit every time they mention getting “red pilled.”

Will O’Bryan is a former Metro Weekly managing editor, living in D.C. with his husband. He is online at www.LifeInFlights.com.