How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The avalanche of Grinchified merch is a reminder that the War on Christmas was real, and Christmas lost.
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When did the Grinch become the Suburban Mom Joker? You know I’m talking about. All those sweatshirts with the Grinch in his Santa suit and text that says, like, “I’m a mean one” or “Naughty List All-Star.” It’s pretty tacky on its own, and a pretty fundamental misread of the story1, but whatever. Being tacky isn’t a crime. What’s a bit more concerning is that this stuff exists at all, and that there’s so much of it.
If you haven’t gone back to the original Dr. Seuss book in a while or peeped Chuck Jones’ 1966 special you’re missing out on a real treat. How the Grinch Stole Christmas clocks in at a breezy 26 minutes, and is powered by the creative energy of three icons in Jones, Boris Karloff and Theodor Geisel himself. And it’s all about how the Grinch learns that Christmas isn’t about stuff after all.
However, the staggering amount of Grinch t-shirts, beanies, mugs, sweatshirts, socks, ornaments, pajamas and so on would suggest that contrary to the message of the story, Christmas is very much about stuff! Heck, baby, you’re in America. Everything is about stuff!
Dr. Seuss’ second wife Audrey Geisel served as President and CEO of Seuss Enterprises until her death in 2018, which might explain the recent explosion of Grinch merch. But even looking beyond the Grinchification of Christmas stuff, it is a very different holiday season out there. Dr. Seuss’ warnings fell on deaf ears. “What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?” To which modern corporations have risen up as one to answer: “NO.” And I think this illustrates that insofar as the War on Christmas was a real thing at all, it’s over and Christmas lost.
One commonly believed myth you see around this time of year is that December 25 used to be a pagan holiday until those pesky Christians came along and appropriated it. This is not exactly accurate. It’s true that December 25 is an unlikely date for Jesus’ actual birthday that ended up getting electoral colleged into the traditionally accepted birthday thanks to some goofy cosmic math that had at least a little to do with the fact that it was the Winter Solstice. But basically every extant religion was trying to claim December 25 as their own at the time. My understanding is that Christians didn’t so much steal December 25 from Romans so much as December 25 was a loose football that every extant religious group was jumping on at the time. Christians came up with the ball. Thanks, Constantine.
I bring this up because while I don’t think it’s totally fair to say Christians stole December 25, it does seem fair to say our new religion of Corporate Consumerism has stolen December 25 out from under Christian noses, more or less with our consent. Looking at the TV commercials, modern carols and the latest wave of Christmas specials, it’s best to think of Christmas 2024 as a fundamentally different holiday than the one Charles Dickens and Dr. Seuss wrote about. It has the same name, date and general aesthetic, but it observes something fairly distinct from the birth of Jesus, and maybe it’s just not helpful to pretend otherwise anymore.
This isn’t to say we should throw in the towel and stop celebrating the birth of Jesus altogether! Perish the very thought! I am just saying that this thing where we try to have our cake and eat it too — celebrating the birth of Jesus as the light of the world and the triumph of Western materialism in one fell swoop — isn’t really working. These two spirits are in irreconcilable tension, our attempts to walk and chew gum at the same time have left us tied up in knots. Materialism has triumphed, and the manger scene is sort of an aesthetic side note to the real party.
This becomes most bone chillingly obvious in this cursed artifact brought to my attention by my friend Sam Theilman. I think a Charlie Brown Christmas is comfortably the best Christmas special of all time, and the one with the most resonant, poignant anti-materialism message. And how best to honor its beloved legacy? A $40 plush toy with a little vox box to recite the Gospel of Luke, of course.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I find something slightly demonic about the existence of this thing, which is more corrosive to our idea of the True Meaning of Christmas than a million “Season’s Greetings!” Starbucks cups. Linus may believe that Christmas is all about what happened in Bethlehem, but 40 percent of him is owned by Sony, 20 percent is owned by the Schultz family and the rest is owned by something called Wild Brain Entertainment. And those companies believe in making money. What possible interest would they have in storing your treasures in Heaven? Consumerism is its own religion, Christmas is its major holiday, and it would be a violation of its values to turn down any money on the big day.
This was the real War on Christmas, and we didn’t lose it. We didn’t even fight it. We welcomed our conquerors with open arms because they had a vaguely Christian aesthetic and we mistook nostalgia for conviction.
I know how Scroogey all this sounds but I actually think there’s a fairly easy way to resolve all of this. I love that Christmas is a time of year to reconnect with family and friends, share a big meal and sing goofy songs. And while all of us should be taking real steps to extricate ourselves from materialism during Christmastime and every other time of the year, that doesn’t mean boycotting the holiday altogether. We can be real about the current state of the holiday and relish the opportunities of the holiday season at the same time. All I’m suggesting is that we stop trying to pretend that the consumeristic part of Christmas and the religious part can continue to play nicely or that they’re somehow working in harmony. That particular center cannot hold and, I’d say, has already collapsed.
And maybe that’s for the best. After all, it wasn’t until Charlie Brown’s own Christmas had gone belly up that Linus was able to come to the rescue with his Gospel reading. It wasn’t till Scrooge stared his own mortality in the face that he decided to keep Christmas in his heart. And it wasn’t until the Whos down in Whoville had lost everything that they were able to get closer to the real deal. We may have lost the War on Christmas, but we didn’t lose anything of value in the fight. Now, those of us who care about the true meaning can start fresh, celebrating something entirely distinct from the Toyotathons and Gift Guides. Celebrating something real.
Dr. Seuss’ Grinch isn’t a mischievous little stinker. He’s a nasty sonofabitch! He’s a mean one!
Interesting piece. I liked it. I think I can provide the symbolic date when the battle was lost. It was November 2015 when Starbucks came out with their new Christmas (okay, Holiday) cups. It was a simple red cup with the Starbucks corporate logo. The Evangelical community -- or at any rate its most vocal members -- was scandalized at the lack of any Christmas symbolism, such as snowflakes or snowmen. Of course, others -- who tended not to be Evangelical -- pointed out at the time that there could be no more purely Christian symbolism than a plain red cup, without the arguably purely secular and commercial "traditional" Christmas symbolism of snowflakes and the like. That so many Evangelicals missed that is pretty solid evidence that Evangelicalism by that time had itself become thoroughly secularized and commercialized.
There was, all the way back in 1999 or 99, a short audio essay on NPR proposing establishing a new holiday for Christ’s birth and leaving December 25th for “the winter holidays.” I found it pretty convincing at the time and still do.