Magazine Christmas

On dreams, disappointment, consumerism, and the true meaning of Christmas

I’m just not that excited about Christmas. 

I’m the kind of person who inspires characters like Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Grinch, and Mr. Potter. I’m the big city businessman boyfriend that the girls in Hallmark movies break up with when a hometown hero teaches her the true meaning of Christmas. I’m Jovie from Elf: refusing to sing in public, “just trying to get through the holidays,” perfectly content to eat Chinese takeout alone on Christmas Eve. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t buy a Christmas tree or decorate my house, because why would I put in all that work just to give myself more work later?

I like structure and routine, and just don’t enjoy the unpredictability of being festive. I don’t see the point in buying Christmasy things if I’ll only use them once a year. I don’t really want other people to give me stuff when I could just buy myself the stuff I actually want. My preferred method of listening to music is the same song constantly until I hate it—and I can’t really choose whether I’m hyperfixated on a Christmas song or not. 

I kind of just don’t care that much.

But let me explain myself. Like all villains, I have an origin story:  

When I was eleven or twelve, I read an article about wine and cheese pairings for holiday parties in a Real Simple magazine—and it awakened something in me. I realized that, more than anything else, I wanted to be the kind of woman who needed this advice. The kind of woman who hosts big elaborate dinner parties and mixes festive cocktails. A classy lady  with big dreams and the power to make them a reality. I wanted to be surrounded by interesting people, wonderful people, people I love who love me back. I wanted a life with special occasions. I wanted something to celebrate. 

My whole life, I’ve wanted what I’ve come to call a “Magazine Christmas”: one with satin red dresses and black leather boots and champagne glasses and cheese trays and a big house full of laughter. I want gentle snowfall and stolen kisses on balconies trimmed in mistletoe. I want candlelight and cranberry sauce and red wine and best friends. I want to be the woman in a car commercial who steps outside in her silky pajamas, and lights up when she sees that dark gray Hyundai Elantra (or whatever) with a big red bow on top. I want to be the little kid who tears down the stairs to open the present he’s been longing for. I want diamond rings and expensive chocolates. I want silver bells and sleigh rides and chestnuts roasting over an open fire. I don’t know what sugar plums are, but I probably want those too.  

I became the unimpressed anti-hero I am today because Christmas always leaves me unsatisfied.

I have three little siblings, so our house isn’t empty on Christmas—but we don’t have that riotous crowd of friends and relatives that would make the day a drama, an event, a party. Growing up, I’d spent the first 24 days of every December baking enough cookies to feed a small country and wrapping whatever boxes my mom handed to me and practicing Christmas carols on the piano and dreaming about a Real Simple Christmas. But by Christmas Day, I always realized that our Christmas feast was just an ordinary family dinner but with ham and a tablecloth. We unwrapped presents, but by noon it was just another normal day. It was yet another year that I didn’t make a cheese board or go to any house parties or kiss anyone under the mistletoe. 

And after so many years of disappointment, I don’t even dream anymore. 



It doesn’t help that Christmas always falls on the shortest, darkest week of the year. The Christmas season is, naturally, the time when I’m cold and tired and it all just seems rather pointless anyway. I can’t get excited about unwrapping gifts when I don’t even have the energy to open the packages I ordered from Amazon. I don’t know why I dream about hosting parties when I don’t even want to FaceTime relatives. Part of me still wants red dresses and sheer tights and shiny shoes—but those are ambitious goals for someone resigned enough to wear pajama pants in public. Who cares, anyway?  

These are exactly the feelings that Christmas is supposed to protect us from. Popular belief holds that Christmas was moved to December to line up with the pagan holidays celebrating the solstice—because it’s not a good time for anyone to be alone in the darkness. I imagine our modern Christmas originated as a little family sharing a meal around a fire in the center of a Stonehenge-esque formation, this little circle of light protecting them from the night beyond. As human beings we have a need to come together around food and fire when the days grow short; Christmas is the barrier we build between ourselves and our fears. It’s a way we protect ourselves from realizing how short and miserable life can be. 

Today, our concept of Christmas is a product of 20th century advertising teaching us that Christmas should be a fur-coat and Coca-Cola holiday, that our food and our family and our gifts should be perfect and beautiful. That we should have a big house with a roaring fire; we should be feasting all night and running to the store at the last minute, but also in bed by midnight—with enough extra cookies to leave some in front of a glorious, dazzling tree that will soon be surrounded by a pile of gifts. No cold or alone or hungry here; Christmas should be everything we’ve ever wanted and then some. 

Even that Real Simple magazine I read as a child is a direct invitation to participate in the economy of Christmas— the way I felt (“I need to be the lady who has a cheese board to be happy”) is the primary purpose of that article. The holiday season has devastated me every year since then because it’s the one time of the year when I truly expect that if I had high heels and an air fryer and an 8’ Christmas tree, I’d be satisfied. Our culture teaches us that if Christmas comes and I feel like something is missing, if I feel empty or unhappy—if I feel the darkness creeping into my little circle of light—I should shop until my dreams are reality.

Yet for people obsessed with escaping it, we’re still so haunted by the darkness. 

Even comedies like Elf and Home Alone have that same scene of Christmas despair— Buddy wandering New York City, saying I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. Kevin finally realizing how alone and vulnerable he is, how much he misses the family that left him behind, and wandering into an almost-empty church. Being hopeless, directionless, unwanted and forgotten by the people who should love us— existential despair is a core part of our Christmas concept. 

So for every fun, sexy Christmas song (think “Baby It’s Cold Outside” or “Sleigh Ride” or “Let It Snow”) there’s a song lamenting the injustice of feeling heartbroken, abandoned, and alone on a day you should be sharing with the one you love. 

Since 1957, Elvis has been crooning that “I'll have a blue Christmas without you,” that despite the “decorations of red on a green Christmas tree,” Christmas is just not the same when you’re alone. “You'll be doing alright/With your Christmas of white,” he says, “But I'll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” 

In “Please Come Home for Christmas,” The Eagles sing “My baby's gone, I have no friends/To wish me greetings once again.” Of course, the narrator later admits that, actually, “Friends and relations send salutations/Sure as the stars shine above,” but that’s not really the problem— “this is Christmas, yes, Christmas, my dear/Some time of year to be with the one you love.” He’s not really alone—Christmas just feels like the time you’re supposed to have something more, someone special. 

My personal favorite in this genre might be “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Darlene Love admits that there’s “lots of people around,” that “the church bells in town/all ringing in song/full of happy sounds,” and the music throughout the song is so bright and lively–we’ve got bells, guitars, a saxophone solo. But what’s so remarkable about this song is Love’s pleading vocals, ending each stanza begging, “baby please come home.”  Everyone around her is having their happy, loving, Magazine Christmases, “they’re singing deck the halls,” they’ve got bells and celebration—but she’s just so lonely, and that’s just “not like Christmas at all.” 

Except, considering how many other artists feel the same way, it seems like loneliness is exactly like Christmas. Our music and movies prove that Christmas is about the love we’ve lost just as much as it is about our present happiness. Christmas is about the people we miss and the dreams that never came true. There’s this recurrent feeling of loneliness and sorrow— the feeling of seeing everyone else gathered around the fireplace, snuggled in with their lovers or loved ones, and finding yourself cold and alone, standing on the icy street looking through frosted windows at that champagne-and-candlelight dream. 

Something about Christmas is about longing more than it is about pleasure; it’s about our ancient and unfulfilled desires more than it is about the gifts. We know that the very real threat of being cold and lonely on Christmas is what defines the safe walls of a jolly, cozy Magazine Christmas. So we spend so much time and money and energy trying to wrap ourselves in Magazine Christmases, numbing ourselves to the cold—but it’s an illusion that always leaves us unsatisfied. No matter how many friends you have, no matter how warm you are inside, there’s a moment at even the most perfect party when you’re alone for a second and looking out the window at the snow swirling in the bitter wind and you remember that this little circle of light is so incredibly fragile. There’s such a thin wall between you and the night.  And you know it. 

So Magazine Christmas is fur and satin and hot chocolate and mistletoe and holly. Magazine Christmas is laughing around long tables and cutting into turkeys and shredding through wrapping paper. And Magazine Christmas is also Black Friday and unkind relatives and upending your budget and your body. Magazine Christmas isn’t just warm, it’s feverish. It’s panicked. And many of us feel like Magazine Christmas has eluded us and left us heartbroken.

But I want to give a name to the second kind of Christmas evident in the American psyche: Cold Christmas. 

We view Cold Christmas as failure, as the absence of light and lovers and laughter. Cold Christmas is poverty and sickness and sorrow. But when I step outside the walls of a Magazine Christmas, I begin to wonder what we were all so afraid of.

Cold Christmas is snowfall and starlight. You can see yourself breathe and hear yourself think. You’re holding a lantern and standing on the hillside and you can see for miles; you’re on your way out to the barn but you just stopped here to take it all in. You’re completely alone. It’s just you, the sky, and the truth. Cold Christmas is haunting and eternal. It terrifies us to be so alone—but have you ever felt so much peace? Cold Christmas is pure, icy joy. Cold Christmas is radiant. Cold Christmas is Charlie Brown’s pathetic little Christmas tree in a world that wants Lucy’s big pink aluminum one. Cold Christmas is songs like “O Holy Night” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem:” something about these carols still strikes me as haunting, mournful, something about them echoes through the night and rings in the deep places of my soul—but they’re full of brightness and yearning and hope.

As a Christian, I think we should embrace this second kind of Christmas. Jesus left the circle of light, he came to our cold and dark earth, so that we wouldn’t have to spend eternity alone in the darkness. The Son of God left the Father’s embrace, left the glory of heaven—left that golden feast with a big, happy, perfect family—so that he could die on a cross, more alone than anyone could ever know. Jesus left the most perfect holiday party for a life of pain and death—so that he might be able to take us home, so that we might be able to celebrate as part of his family. 

So the first Christmas was a teenage girl and her little boy, in a barn because there was no room at the inn. The first Christmas was straw and linen and the brightest star in the night sky. The first Christmas was a manger in the shadow of a cross and a tomb. The first Christmas was the moment when heaven touched earth. I imagine the first Christmas was simple and brilliant, more glorious and more joyful than any Hallmark movie. 

So to live on earth is to live with darkness, but because of Jesus I know that the darkness won’t overcome us. I’m not afraid to leave the temporary warmth of our fragile little campfires, to step into the night and see the stars. I don’t want to be cozy and numb, I want to stand in wonder at this bright and cold eternity. I’m not living for a Magazine Christmas anymore. 

But I do need to learn to dream again. 

Holidays made me sad because I was looking for Christmas to save me, rather than knowing that Christ already had. For so many years, I put my hope in the illusion of a warm, chocolatey, evergreen and candlelight, Magazine Christmas—and after just as many years of disappointment, I hardened my heart to hope. Resignation was the callous that protected me from being crushed year after year. 

But if I believe that Jesus entered our winter to invite us into his Christmas, then I also have faith that I will someday experience the true and deep pleasure of a perfect Christmas in the love and warmth and abundance of heaven. I believe I will someday be welcomed into that eternal circle of light. Until then, I’ll be content to enjoy the goodness in every earthly Christmas that comes my way.