Sometimes, you just get these nice confidence boosts when you aren’t expecting them. I was looking at the first page of my current book for reference for the second, and one panel caught my eye. I feel like I just drew the prettiest woman in the world. Obviously, I meant for her to look pretty, but I couldn’t expect her to be so, so pretty. I made her my always-on display. She’s so pretty! It feels amazing to know I drew the prettiest woman in the world. You’ll see what I mean in time.
I just got off from a full five-day week of Christmas retail, so I’m still thinking about what this holiday does to people. I’d say I like Christmas a normal amount. It’s a good holiday, gift-giving can be a wonderful way to show love, you get to spend time with your family, and it’s nice to have something to look forward to in the middle of winter. I don’t think it’s the greatest day ever, the most important day of the year or my life. It’s a pretty good day, and maybe you’ll get a present you really like. That’s about how it was growing up for me, too, I think. My family had some decorations, and maybe one or two Christmas albums, though I don’t remember listening to them. It was fun and exciting. We didn’t spend all of November and December mainlining everything Christmas, and my parents didn’t use the promise of it as the universe’s greatest reward or to convince us to behave better lest it be taken away.
I say all that to help explain why I feel the way I do about Christmas as it’s practiced in America. It’s the most overhyped thing in all of existence, and I hate hype. I avoid good shows and books if they’re being hyped a lot, because if I’m promised the best thing I’ve ever experienced, anything less is a disappointment and a betrayal. Christmas can’t live up to anyone’s hype about it. Quite frankly, it’s irresponsible and I don’t get the point of it. I’ve never known a kid who actually changed their behavior throughout the year because of Christmas; kids don’t typically plan that far ahead, since a whole year’s wait is unimaginable for them. The really big, full Christmas requires so much work to make actually happen, most of which is pushed on women, that it has to be more stressful than fulfilling, or at least it’s not worth the cost. Not everyone is doing all of that, though, either because they don’t want to or can’t. Then you have to explain to poor kids why they only get one nice thing while the rich kids get mountains.
It’s no news that Christmas is full of contradictions; it’s a holiday about togetherness that’s extremely commercial and centered around material goods. I don’t think we spend enough time really appreciating how deep that rot goes. Take ugly Christmas sweaters, for instance. The tradition is based on the idea that your grandmother (or other such figure in your life) makes you a sweater for the winter, maybe every year. They’re not the best at it, at least not anymore, and they don’t have the best design sense. You end up with an ugly sweater that you’d never willingly get for yourself and wear it with love, because you know what went into making it and what it means. Nowadays, a bunch of companies purposefully make the tackiest sweaters you can think of and convince you to buy them because the phrase “ugly Christmas sweater” exists and is thus part of the whole ritual. They replaced your loving grandmother with empty commercial nonsense. Purposefully tacky isn’t the same thing as trying to make something nice and ending up with an ugly product, you know? They’re not even always ugly; they just as often make nice sweaters based on fandoms and pretend it’s the same thing.
This gets into what I don’t like about Christmas music and movies. I did a whole rundown on Christmas movies a couple weeks back, and beyond the assimilationist messaging, a big part of why I don’t like those movies is that they’re centered around the formation of a romantic relationship. Christmas isn’t a romance holiday. We have one of those in the winter, it’s called Valentine’s Day. Just because we’re using the word “love” in both holidays doesn’t mean that any kind of love is the same, or that every situation involving love counts. Like, there are plenty of songs and stories about married and longtime couples remarking that their love is the gift that keeps on giving, just as you’d say about your family’s love. That’s fine; it’s a nice sentiment about how the relationships and connections you have in life are what really matters, because they’re what the gifts are supposed to symbolize. Hooking up with someone in December is not a Christmas activity. If “all you want for Christmas” is to form a long term romantic relationship with someone, then you’re not giving them your heart or being frugal and/or low maintenance. Those are just tricks of language. Obviously, shoot your shot whenever, but it doesn’t have to do with the holiday.
The Mariah Carey song is especially galling to me as the quintessential example of both Christmas hypocrisy and using weasel words to be selfish. In the song, she continually refers to Santa as the figure bringing all the presents, and rejects that in favor of a romantic relationship that she’s hoping to form. But she’s a full grown adult, who knows full well that Santa isn’t real, and all those presents that don’t mean anything to her come from her friends and family, who went out of their way to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on her so she’d have a smile and could celebrate their bond. How ungrateful can you get? “Yeah, mom and dad, go jump off a cliff, nothing you do means anything to me unless this cutie gives me a call back!” It’s the most famous and popular Christmas song, and it rejects both commercialist gift-giving and the sense of togetherness that the holiday is actually supposed to be about, in favor of a generic and not particularly good love song with a couple set decorations that guarantee she can rake in infinite royalties every winter.
Plus, none of the covers are good; they’re either trying to mimic Mariah so much you might as well hear the original, or they’re bad takes that get love because they’re “that song.” If it seems like I’ve spent too much time with this opinion, it’s because I have to hear twenty covers of this song every day. That and Last Christmas. Terrible song, and I have to hear it dozens of times a day. I’ve only ever heard one version of it that’s any good, the Arlo Parks cover. Seems weird that she’s the only person I’ve heard sing those sad, self-loathing lyrics with the right emotion. All this Christmas music is a psychic assault that really feels illegal. Like I’ve said, I prefer when things happen when they happen, not for months ahead of time. I also don’t decorate for holidays because I like my home to look like my home all the time (plus, all the money and effort and storage costs).
Christmas is like Star Wars: It’s all nostalgia and hype, and if you point that out, people get mad at you for suggesting the myth isn’t real. That’s what makes it so frustrating to deal with people about Christmas. If you complain about the music and decorations and ads starting up right after Halloween, you’re told to shut up and just not participate if you don’t like it. As if any of this is optional; as if I can, and should have to, build myself a bunker where Christmas can’t find me, while still getting to live my life; as if they want Christmas stuff that early, too, and aren’t just victims of artificial nostalgia and propaganda from a lifetime of having their most intimate moments commercialized. It is a genuinely nice holiday, so I don’t want to say everyone is a dupe, but it kinda boils down to that? Capitalism is great at either creating nice lies or coopting nice traditions to exploit people. The tradition is still nice under it all, and you can find a better life by making the lie true, without that changing how you’re being used by the system if you keep perpetuating the commercial ritual.
I’m ranting. Christmas shouldn’t be a big deal. Get people one present each, just to be nice, and spend the day together. To wind down, let’s all remember that anyone who complains about “Happy Holidays” is stupid, because it’s literally a Christmas greeting. The holidays are the twelve days of Christmas, aka Advent. It’s a nice thought that we can use the phrase to refer to other holidays in this time slot, but it’s literally referring to the holiday(s) people complain about it erasing. Because how terrible would it be if we acknowledged that, just as some of us don’t want to celebrate Christmas for months, some of us don’t celebrate it at all? It’s almost as if we live in a diverse country “founded on religious freedom,” as we were told in school.
Weekly Thoughts 12/16/23
Life in the Gutters 