Merry Christmas

In Which Vox Melts Down

Well, it looks like we might get some winter after all. Left the house this morning without a coat because there hasn’t been a need for one since May, but here I am, freezing as in olden times. I should have dug up my dahlia rhizomes, sigh.

File:Image taken from page 17 of 'The Coming of Father Christmas' (11228106243).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, I was noodling around online, trying to convince myself that I don’t need to read about politics every second of the day, and found this—it turns out I’m not crazy, Christmas is occurring earlier than ever (from Vox and therefore full of bad language):

After last week’s presidential election, something unusual started happening in my neighborhood: On a walk to a wine bar on November 11, I saw stoops lined with pine garlands next to skeletons and spider webs, relics from Halloween a mere week and a half prior. Someone had set up two life-size nutcrackers on their front porch; someone else’s brownstone windows offered a peep into their living room, where a fully lit Christmas tree was already aglow inside. But according to people all over the country, it wasn’t just my neighborhood. The early start to the most festive season seemed to be a reaction to — what else — the results of the election, which plunged many Americans into an uncanny mood they haven’t experienced since the last time Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Or, as Massachusetts social worker Dylana Becker put it: “Holiday lights because my daughter may have no fucking rights.”

Is it just me, or is the conflation of abortion with “rights” the most depressing thing in the world? Also, I am excessively bothered by the sentiments here expressed. Christmas was not invented by Home Depot and Temu, or whatever that website is where you can buy a lot of plastic stuff for super cheap. It was invented by God when the Father sent the Son to clothe himself in human flesh, taking the form of a servant, not counting equality with God as something to be grasped, not disdaining the virgin’s womb, coming in the humility and helplessness of an infant to redeem humanity from the desolation of sin and death. The reason to put up a Christmas Tree is that Jesus is the Tree of Life who restores humanity’s friendship with God. Put lights on the tree because he is the Light. Give extravagant and beautiful gifts to those you love because Jesus gave his life for the world.

How small and stupid to live in a world of rights instead of blessings and gifts. How dumb when you think that killing another person is the only way to be happy.

Anyway, we carry on:

Becker started putting up Christmas decor on November 6th. Rachael Kay Albers, a marketing professional in Chicago, told me she “just bought a 10-foot tree, not even on sale,“ with the philosophy, “Fuck it, it’s time for twinkles.” Rachel Lewis, a social media manager in North Carolina, erected an inflatable penguin on her roof that same week. “Our neighbor said, ‘Isn’t it early?’ And we said ‘No, it’s not.’”

Please, Lord Jesus, come back, because this is literally the worst.

Much like how interest in elaborate skincare routines exploded in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election, Americans seem to be diverting their anxieties into holiday cheer, if only by sheer force. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why: In uncertain times, we seek escape and comfort, and nothing occupies a cozier or more nostalgic place in the American imagination than Christmas. Couple that with a late Thanksgiving, and people are seeing little point in waiting for the turkey to be done to put up their trees.

Or, hear me out, in uncertain times get on your knees and as the Lord Jesus to come live in your heart, soul, mind, and body through the power of the Holy Spirit by repentance and the forgiveness of sins. The miracle of Christmas is that you don’t have to die forever because Jesus came to take up the cross that leads to Easter which is the resurrection of the dead. You don’t need nostalgia, you need the gospel. Or rather, whoever writing this article needs it because I expect readers of this blog already know the basic facts about the universe. Namely that God is real and you don’t have despair because of who the president is right now:

For some, Christmas came even before the polls closed. Mia Moran, a children’s book editor in Queens, said she went shopping for Christmas pillows at Target in early November. “This year it just feels like we needed something,” she tells me. “[Christmas] is a good outlet, and also a neutral sense of pure joy. It’s not charged in any way.” It’s ironic, considering the decades-long right-wing mania about the supposed “war on Christmas” by the media establishment. This year, for the first time in recent memory, perhaps it’s the left who’s more fervently embracing the holiday. “When the polls close in your state, you are officially allowed to begin playing Christmas music,” tweeted First Amendment lawyer Adam Steinbaugh on the evening of the election. After it became clear Trump was winning, comedian Mike Drucker posted, “I’m listening to Christmas music starting tomorrow cuz fuck this shit.”

Wow, nothing says Christmas Spirit like a lot of performative profanity. Speaking of the War on Christmas, I got in trouble working as a cash register person at the Christmas Tree Shop some 17 years ago for wishing a customer who had wished me a Merry Christmas, “Merry Christmas.” The floor supervisor swept in to reprimand me. I had just directed the Christmas Pageant at church and then, kissing all my babies goodnight, braved the desecrating soullessness of godless consumerism of the late shift on Christmas Eve because we needed the money. I meekly said I was sorry and kept swiping plastic junk over the scanner, smiling at tired and exhausted shoppers who, like me, felt the clawing anxiety of lack—lack of money, lack of time, lack of hope.

Christmas is so hard because it is yet one more moment when the expectation of goodness confronts the dark reality of trouble, of not getting the one thing you most particularly wanted—a way to pay that bill, a resolution to a broken relationship, a child, relief from pain, for the person who has gone into the grave to suddenly come back again.

You want sparkles and sweets but then Donald Trump gets elected and for some reason, even though he is literally on the side of the death of the innocents if it suits the mother, you think he will take away your “right” to kill your baby, so then you just decide to have the sparkles and sweets even harder. I guess, if it makes you feel happy to bash away about the war on Christmas which was, at least for a while, as much a thing as as any division in American political life, go ahead. Anyway, we carry on:

According to the Wall Street Journal, forcing holiday spirit is a “healthy response” to election stress, one that “beats sitting there saying, ‘Oh my god, this is an existential threat to the world and I’m going to enter a doom and gloom loop,’” explained Kevin Smith, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It’s also entirely possible that it isn’t just the election that’s caused this year’s bout of “Christmas creep,” a term that’s been discussed and debated since the 1980s. The phenomenon itself has existed far longer, however: Early Christmas sales (and complaints about them) can be traced back to the Victorian era. It’s typical for customers to be annoyed by businesses using far-off holidays as marketing tools. What’s less common is for Americans to seemingly all agree, individually, that the time for twinkle lights is now. This year, per Axios, retail experts say that holiday deals are starting early partly because of the fact that there are five fewer days between Black Friday and Christmas this year, and partly because of election uncertainty. Lowe’s, for instance, launched its holiday decor line in July, a month earlier than the year before, while Amazon moved its Prime Day up to early October.

Well shoot, I did not expect to have missed Prime Day, of all things. This next part is definitely true:

America’s favorite coping mechanism has always been buying stuff, and if Christmas spending is any indication, we’ve been getting steadily more anxious for years. The National Retail Federation expects the typical consumer will spend $902 on Christmas gifts and decor, up $25 from last year, reports Business Insider. Prophecy Market Insights projects that the Christmas decoration industry will nearly double in the next decade, from $8.45 billion in 2024 to $13 billion in 2034. Charles Scheland, a professional modern dancer in Manhattan, says that in addition to putting up his tree, string lights, and nutcracker statue, he’s also already started pulling his favorite Christmas music to teach in his dance classes. He says that part of that is due to the shock and disappointment of what began as a galvanizing Democratic campaign. “I really think that the joy of the Harris campaign and the optimism of that movement got people excited, and to have that so deafening crushed, people just want to get some of that joy,” he says.

If you want a really comprehensive takedown of all that that “joy” actually amounted to, check out Megyn Kelly’s long explanation of why Ms. Harris lost. Incidentally, it is curious to me that they chose the word “joy” which is, I would have thought, the provenance of things religious, rather than political. Joy, by its very nature, isn’t something that can be polled, like what your feelings are today about the Senate’s ability to do its job, or what you think about trans rights. Joy goes to the depth of the spirit, to the very soul of the person who either feels in the depths of herself that all manner of things will ultimately be ok and therefore the circumstances of the moment are not the only thing that matters—or doesn’t. The opposite of joy is hopelessness, and that is not something to get excited about, especially in an election year. Anyway, we grind along:

There’s also another reason for the skip from Halloween to Christmas, he posits. “Thanksgiving is a tricky holiday because it is often celebrated with extended family, and sometimes we don’t agree with our extended family. So rather than getting into the trickier holiday, we’re just jumping ahead to the next.”

Narrator, it is not a tricky holiday. It’s a delicious dinner with the people you love best. The only way it’s tricky is if you decide to blow up your life over politics. The only way it’s tricky is if you have embarrassed yourself on TikTok. The only way it’s tricky is if you are those grifters from MSNBC who flew down to meet with Trump after calling him literaleigh Hitler for four years.

In the years since 2020, holidays, and to an even greater extent, seasons, have become celebrations not just IRL in the form of decor and activities, but online. People on TikTok and Instagram began to document their “winter arcs,” their “Meg Ryan falls,” and their hot girl summers as a way of marking the passage of time when it seemed like the only way to feel alive was watching someone else’s life through a screen. As I’ve argued before, dividing one’s life into seasons and leaning heavily into seasonal aesthetics is a way of romanticizing your life while also dissociating from it, a potentially useful tool when it feels like nothing makes sense.

It’s so dumb that the writers at Vox would feel like “nothing makes sense.” For heaven’s sake. Everything makes sense. There is a frame around the world that offers meaning and purpose consummate with reality. You’re not God, for example, and so cannot control the weather or the inclinations of the voting population, however much you wish you could. You are a creature who owes God perfect worship, which you cannot give because you are a sinner. Fortunately, he came as a baby at Christmas to transfer you from the Kingdom of this world into the Kingdom of Heaven. Go read the Bible, you poor dears, instead of sitting there freaking out about how bad you—a person with an internet connection, a device upon which to read the article, and probably clothes, warmth, food, and relationships—have it. Here’s the home stretch:

I’m not immune, either. After my unexpectedly festive neighborhood walk, two wines deep, I decided that I absolutely needed to make a reservation at one of those bars in Manhattan where they deck it out with festive decor for the month of December. In most respects, these are miserable establishments — the kind of bars that are overpriced and crowded to the point of sweltering, places marketed with the promise of quaintness and communal cheer but mostly exist as traps for tourists to take photos in. But in that moment, being surrounded by a million twinkling wreaths and giant red bows and exhausted holiday shoppers from New Jersey sounded like not the worst place to be. In fact, I could think of much worse things: a decaying democracy, or a man investigated for sex crimes being installed as attorney general, for instance. So screw it, it’s Christmas now. May we all find merriment where we can.

Join me in praying for this poor soul to meet the Lord Jesus this holiday season so that she will find holiness, joy, hope, and a smidgeon of chocolate.

Have a nice day!