At some point in my life I transitioned from “Christmas is Awesome” to “Christmas is vaguely annoying and I don’t know why”. I know part of it is the commercialization - but that’s the easy answer, and fairly incomplete. I love/hate snow, depending on whether I’m driving and whether the roads have been salted, and how warm my feet are in a given moment. I actually enjoy finding gifts for loved ones in most cases - though receiving gifts is barely awkward and uncomfortable, especially when the gift is something I largely do not care for and must now feign gratitude in recipe of. I love a good fire, in a fireplace or otherwise. Christmas music is largely hit or miss, and there are so few truly good holiday songs that I think the repetition gets to me before anything else. And largely I do life Christmas decorations - what’s not to love about twinkle lights and glitter?
Commercialization - hate
Snow - yay?
Gifts - neutral
Fire - yay!
Music - no
Decorations - yay
So what gives? Why am I so largely irritated by a holiday that should come out a a net neutral?
I think about this every year, and this year it finally crystalized for me - we’ve taken all of the teeth out of winter.
Krampus in Quebec, December 2024
Last year, in Quebec - where the cold was real and the scary monsters still lurked in the dark - Christmas was amazing. Even though the Cramps in the parade was largely a cute huggable beasty, the beast was still present. In the US our beast has been defanged, like the abominable snow monster in that Rudolf movie we’ve all grown up on.
What is an Abominable Snow Monster without any teeth?
I can’t help but feeling that when you take all the teeth out of the holiday, the joy becomes too saccharine with nothing to temper it. Kids get told Santa only brings presents to good kids, but no kids actually get coal - though lots of kids go without anything at all. Family gatherings feel more obligatory than for protection and security, and with the need to live where jobs exist and only travel within the schedule your job does or does not allow - that gathering becomes more of an upper class privilege year by year, at the mercy of capitalism rather than the scary monsters in the dark.
The scary monsters in the dark are slowly but steadily replaced by people, and the god of commerce. All of the folklore has been removed and replaced with paper receipts and empty bank accounts. And while winter itself seems to be dying - it’s a balmy 62 degrees in Kansas City today - and a look at the Christmas temperatures since 1895 does show an upward trend in temperature, how much of this disconnect between weather and holiday has to do with the homogenization of culture? Most of the North American Christmas tradition developed in Northern Europe hundreds of years ago.
Kansas City Christmas temperature highs from 1895 to 2024, trendline in pink.
In the end my distaste of Christmas as currently practiced seems to be a result of several things - distaste for capitalism and the God of Money, displacement from a climate where any of the Christmas traditions even make sense, and the lack of scary monsters to balance the flavor of too many sugar plums. Even the Nutcracker has an army of mice creeping in from every shadow, these days all we have to fear is corporate greed.