"One Holy Night" is a short story about a girl who falls in love with a boy, becomes pregnant, and loses the innocence of her childhood. There are several themes which you might like to analyse, and perhaps two of the most important are love and deception.

Love in the story is presented in a rather negative light. At the beginning of the story, the boy who the narrator falls in love with tells her that he will love her "like a revolution, like a religion." These similes suggest to the narrator that the boy's love for her will be life-changing, and the love between them sacred. She falls so much in love with this promise of love that she imagines losing her virginity to this boy. She imagines that it, her virginity, will "come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds." The connotations of "gold thread" suggest that the girl thinks of her virginity as something precious and delicate. The "birds" connote the feeling of transcendent freedom which she imagines she will experience after losing her virginity to the boy she loves. For the narrator, losing her virginity is, or is imagined to be, the ecstatic culmination and realization of her love.

Tragically, however, the narrator's love for this boy culminates in disappointment, despair, and the loss of her old, innocent self. The most significant symbol for this anticlimactic culmination of her love is, of course, the baby she is left with. She describes this baby as one might describe a predatory animal. It stirs inside her, and "circles and circles" like an animal about to pounce. One day, she fears, "it will tear from (her) with its own teeth." This baby is the literal and figurative culmination of her love for the boy.

The theme of deception is implied early in the story. Indeed, the opening lines of the story are, "He said his name was Chaq. Chaq Uxmal Paloquin. That's what he told me." The implication of these lines is that the boy she knew as Chaq told her lies. A little later in the story, she describes Chaq's voice as "sometimes like broken clay, and at other times like hollow sticks." The images here, "broken" and "hollow," foreshadow the narrator's realization that the boy's declarations of love are, like the clay and like the sticks, also "broken" and "hollow."

The themes of deception and love in this story go hand-in-hand. Arguably, the narrator's love is no more than a childish infatuation, manipulated and exploited by a boy who, in fact, turns out to be a much older, deceitful man. He takes a young girl's naive impressions of love and exploits them to get what he wants. When the girl realizes the deception, much of the pain she feels is perhaps rooted in the fact that her first experience of love, which she thought so pure and beautiful, is so negligently defiled, abused, and betrayed.