Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- As Christmas season went into full swing this year, Glen Fullmer's 7-year-old son came home from school with an assignment: Make a poster illustrating his family holiday traditions.

The boy wasn't sure how to proceed because he and his family are Baha'is, not Christians, and they have no holidays during the Christmas season.

Thus, Fullmer encountered the "December Dilemma" -- the term used for the quandaries and anxieties non-Christians and interfaith couples face during Christmas season.

Fullmer, a Baha'i faith spokesman who lives in Evanston, Illinois, said he saw the poster assignment as a "teachable moment" for his 4-, 7- and 10-year-old sons who associated holiday traditions with Christmas.

He reminded his boys that Baha'is have a gift-giving and charity period in February called Ayyam-i-Ha, a stretch of time not unlike the Christmas season.

And he helped his son design the poster about that holiday, which precedes a fasting period and then the Baha'i New Year in March.

"His classmates asked him questions about the holiday, and one of his friends came up to him and wants to celebrate that holiday," Fullmer said, pleased that his son's peers helped him reaffirm his identity.

Navigating the Christmas season can be a challenge for the millions of people who don't celebrate the holiday. Many acknowledge and sometime embrace the season's customs, such as gift-giving and sending out greeting cards, while at the same time they are conscious of maintaining their own religious identities.

The mysteries of Midnight Mass

I was brought up an Anglican. As a young teen, I used to love going with my parents to Midnight Mass in one of our nearby country parish churches or to the parish church in Cirencester, where there'd be candles, processions, a choir singing carols that soared into the dimly lit vault above us, and the mystery of sung Eucharist.

The emotional impact of the ritual and the music has stayed with me, even though I've been a Baha'i for more than 40 years.

Raising children and the "feel" of counter-cultural calendars

My wife and I brought our three children up as Baha'is and - of course - celebrated Ayyam-i-Ha and the Baha'i holy days with them. Baha'i community life has its own calendar, its own rhythm and pattern. We wanted that to become as much part of their identity as Christmas and Hannukah and Eid and Divali are for Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus.

But the challenge is this: the Baha'i community is relatively small and is embedded in a culture that has turned Christmas into a consumer-fest that tries to indoctrinate all of us into the spend, spend, spend that drives the consumerist machine. How does a small community establish a deep-rooted "feel" of the pattern of its own sacred year in its children, without at the same time making them feel like outcasts from the mainstream?

And be sure that calendars are as much a matter of the "feel" of their rhythm as they are of calculation.

My Iranian Baha'i friends, whose families have been Baha'is for generations, have that "feel" embedded in their hearts and souls as they celebrate the Ayyam-i-Ha and commemorate the solemn anniversaries of the Martyrdom of the Bab and the Ascension of Baha'u'llah.

This year Jacob, our rising-four-year-old-grandson who lives with us took part for the first time in his nursery's nativity play (as a cow!) He, too, inevitably begins to be immersed in the excitement of the season and the expectation of presents.

Now, Jacob loves going to the Nineteen Day Feast and other Baha'i gatherings; he loves to recite one or other of the Baha'i prayers he's learned by heart. Our challenge is to educate him - as Glen Fullmer is doing with his sons - to understand, to embrace the spiritual and social significance of the rhythm and pattern of Baha'i community life.