I'll Have a Bad Christmas, That's Certain

The worse your Christmas is, the closer it is to the point.

Several years ago, my roommates and I hosted a Christmas party and asked everyone who came to bring some sort of musical instrument for a carol singalong. The result was a enormous mishmash of well-trained artists (a couple roommates worked in the university’s music department) and dozens of amateur Christmas enthusiasts with tambourines, kazoos or any other cheapo noisemaker a novice could handle after several glasses of eggnog.

I’ve been trying to get my hands on the hilarious, horrifying recording of what happened next ever since, but the highlight is imprinted on my brain with a clarity that rivals my wedding day. We were well and truly hammered and it was time for “Mary, Did You Know?” For some reason, my friend Aaron was selected to handle vocal duties. He had a good voice and, unlike most of us, some real musical talent. The only problem was he didn’t know the words.

So everyone strummed, blew and drummed out the somber opening notes of the song and Aaron launched into what little he could recall and made up the rest: “Mary, did you know that your baby would be such a big baby.”

Look. I know you had to be there. But it’s probably in the top five or six hardest times I’ve ever laughed in my life. The orchestra collapsed. I was SOBBING.

I think anyone who’s spent any appreciable time around Christmas has a story like this. If you’ve ever been part of a Christmas pageant or cantata or, God help us, a living nativity, you’ve seen things go tits up. It’s the natural consequence of grand ambitions (a historical recreation with supernatural elements), limited resources (the church budget) and chaotic energy (a cast of children and, possibly, live animals).

But there is a real case to be made that the worse your Christmas thing is, the closer it is to the point. The very first Christmas went about as poorly as it could have gone, and every subsequent attempt to make it look fancier or cozier or more impressive just sails right over what makes the original story click.

Sufjan Stevens, of all people, really gets this. Other artists treat Christmas schmaltziness as an obstacle to overcome, but Sufjan embraces it. His little era of annual Christmas projects were so good because they were often pretty bad: slapdash orchestras, one-take singalongs and grand yuletide symphonies with the seams showing. Even when his Christmas songs are at their absolute best (“Sister Winter,” “Christmas Unicorn”) they’re still just plain weird. This is, to me, as close to the spirit of Christmas as humans are likely to get.

(Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album leaned into this energy too. I also am very fond of Frightened Rabbit’s “It’s Christmas So Let’s Stop,” and its beautiful, stupid line: “We can be best friends with the people we hate.” I can’t tell if it was deliberately bad or not. Does it matter?)

I realize that all of this is just a longwinded way to reiterating the message of A Charlie Brown Christmas with that blockhead’s stupid little tree. But maybe it can’t be reiterated too much. We are being bombarded by millions (millions!) of corporate ads designed by well-paid experts to convince us that the only good Christmas is an expensive Christmas, and you are not immune to propaganda. I do believe in a certain kind of war on Christmas, but I think “Merry Christmas!” can operate as a Trojan Horse in this war.

The real war on Christmas isn’t “Season’s Greetings” VS “Merry Christmas” or Santa VS Baby Jesus. It’s rampant consumerism versus us, the people who can’t afford the life in tv commercials anyway, fighting for the dignity to celebrate the holiday with our family and loved ones completely divorced from the expectations foisted upon us by advertising agencies. That is a war we are losing. But I think we can count every Christmas celebration gone awry as a win for the good guys

In this culture, a bad Christmas is an act of rebellion, in service of the holy and righteous cause of Mary’s big baby.

Merry Christmas!