dreaming of a white christmas, or: tis the season for manufactured nostalgia

04 Dec, 2025

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know

Christmas for me, growing up, was a big family dinner at my grandparents' house, or at my aunt and uncle's house right next door. Living as I did in the deserts of eastern Washington, there was often, but not always, snow on the ground; it was usually very cold. The dinner wasn't itself special--a big family dinner over at one of those houses was a routine occurrence, and smaller dinners even more so. But on Christmas there was more food, and more guests--family friends and relatives braving the icy desert highways. There were presents; there were the elaborate decorations my aunt was so fond of. The whole dining room would be filled with people and conversation.

I couldn't tell you what we ate, except that there was almost certainly some form of pie that my aunt made from scratch. Turkey? Ham? Who knows? These big family dinners were not about the food, as such, but about coming together and eating together at the same table. My grandfather was a traditionalist in that (and many other) respects: a family should eat together. He also believed in offering his hospitality to those who needed it, so there was a rotating cast of exchange students living in the rooms that his children had long since moved out of, and they were just as vital a participant in the ritual as anyone. (It strikes me now that I don't think I ever knew if they were expected to participate in these dinners as part of the conditions for the offer of hospitality, but I suspect no one ever put this to the test.)

This diminished somewhat after my grandfather passed away; or maybe it started when my grandparents started wintering down in Arizona. The rest of the family tried to carry on that dream of the whole family getting together for holidays, carrying on that ritual, but without the late pater familias there it lost some of its formality. But that old image from my childhood stays burned in my mind. It's powerful: something formative, something lost, something that is deeply human.

I do not see that image reflected in the way we celebrate Christmas as a culture.

With the kids jingle belling / And everyone telling you "be of good cheer" / It's the most wonderful time of the year

I'm trying to remember how old I was when me and my friend group started imagining making a movie that was a take on A Christmas Carol. Probably high school, I think? I don't know if we ever got past the idea stages; we were very good at sitting around and coming up with ideas were things. Anyway, the point of it was something about how Christmas is actually a high holiday of consumerism driven by corporate profit, blah blah, you've heard it before. Entry-level shit.¹

It's a fair critique but it's also rather quotidian. I bring it up here as a sign that I was jaded with Christmas from a fairly young age, but I don't think I actually correctly identified what bothered me about it, at heart. Consumerism and corporate greed rightly repulsed me, of course, but as I consider it, I think the actual root that bothers me is the inauthenticity of the season. We are told, with some regularity, that it is time to be happy. It is time to be jolly. It's the hap-happiest season of all. It's the most. Wonderful. Time. Of the year. All of which is about as authentic as a teambuilding exercise at a mandatory corporate retreat.

Despite all of my religious trauma, the traditional Christmas media that bothers me the least has always been the more overtly religious Christmas carols.² These are at least expressing a genuine sentiment; I may not derive any joy from "Joy to the World" but this at least feels like a genuine celebration of something the writer feels is good news, rather than a songwriter adopting a minor key with some tinkling bells and shouting the words "happy" and "jolly" over and over again until people are convinced that they are feeling those emotions.

Christmas is an aesthetic. It's snowflakes and evergreens decked with tinsel; it's candy canes and snowmen; it's piles of presents and tinkling bells. And Christmas media spends a great deal of energy constructing that aesthetic and marketing it as this magical, carefree time that will remind of us of innocent days gone by. And though I certainly advocate being skeptical of nostalgia, I think what truly grates me about Christmas as she is celebrated in the year of our lord 2025 is not simply that it is nostalgic, but that it is manufactured nostalgia. It is a simulacrum: a copy without an original. The Christmas that Christmas media tries to sell us does not exist, has never existed, cannot exist.

I can make amends, but I can't make us friends / Merry Christmas anyway

These days when I think of Christmas I think of snowcapped mountains looming through the clouds, vast ominous reminders that we mortals are fragile things in a world that does not care about us one bit. I think of stress and financial hardship and the unrelenting grey of winter. It's a bleak time of year; I certainly don't begrudge people a winter holiday to brighten the long nights. It's just hard for me to get on board.

But also I think of that handful of years when my parents opted to winter in Arizona rather than endure the cold; in those years, my sister and I and any others who were unable to make it home for the holiday would gather to celebrate by watching Star Trek and eating frozen pizzas. No attempts to capture some lost moments, just coming together and celebrating that we are still here, and still able to gather. In a world where everything is so fragile, that is so, so important. I think if I learned one thing from my grandparents and the rotating cast of foreign exchange students staying under their roof, it's that there is a lot of power in found family,³ in letting people know, wherever they are, that they are not alone.

You're not alone, friends. I hope the season is kind to you.

#essay