A New Christmas Garland

O Holy Night, or: My Uncle’s Racist Christmas Sweater

P*TR*C** L*CKW**D

Christmas smells like ham, peppermint, and the dying embers of an argument about pronouns. My uncle wears a sweater he found at a thrift store in 1998, and it says “Let’s Go Brandon,” except it actually just says “Let’s Go” because, he explains, the Brandon part (which was never actually there) came off in the wash. He doesn’t know what it means, but he knows it means something, and he knows it will make me mad. It does not make me mad. I look at him and feel a kind of pity, like watching a horse try to work an iPad.

The tree is shedding needles like it has given up. The dog is eating them, which is technically not toxic, but I will have to Google it later. My mother is filling the house with the noises of a person who has become Christmas: the exclamation “Oh, I forgot about these!” upon unearthing the good wine glasses, the murmured “just a little more” as she adds an entire stick of butter to something that does not need it. She watches Hallmark movies where women of varying sizes (“like blonde matryoshka dolls,” I text myself) leave their high-powered jobs in New York to open bakeries in towns with names like Twilight Hollow or Holly Falls. “I like that it’s not trying to be good,” she says, dreamily.

My cousin—who is trying to make it as a D.J., or possibly a magician, no one is sure—announces that he is “really into vinyl now.” He puts on an album of Gregorian chant. My uncle shifts uncomfortably, sensing something Catholic in the air. He once told me that the pope—“the old one”—was “basically a communist” and that “the Mass is a gateway drug to globalism.” He has now made it his life’s work to find a cashier at Target who will refuse to say “Merry Christmas” to him so he can complain about it. He has never succeeded.

At dinner, my mother asks me to say grace, even though I am the godless one in the family. I stare at the mashed potatoes, composing an ecumenical prayer in my mind: “Dear Lord, dear universe, dear Kevin, manager of the Red Lobster where I once saw a man propose marriage over a basket of Cheddar Bay Biscuits—” but my uncle has already started in about the war on Christianity. My mother glares at him, my father pointedly stabs a ham slice, my cousin whispers, “The chants are powerful, bro.”

Later, we open presents. My uncle gets a new sweater. It is red and green and says BELIEVE in large, looping letters. “Believe in what?” he asks, suspiciously.

“Christmas,” my mother says, exasperated.

“Jesus,” my father suggests.

“The chants,” my cousin says.

“The inherent unknowability of the universe,” I offer.

My uncle squints at the sweater, trying to determine whether it contains hidden propaganda. He mutters something about globalists but puts it on anyway. “It’s warm,” he admits.

And in that moment, against all odds, we have found peace on Earth.


The Case for More Christmas

M­­*TTH*W YGL*S**S

People say we have too much Christmas. That the season starts too early, that the music is inescapable, that the emphasis on gift-giving fuels mindless consumerism and financial stress. But if you actually look at the numbers, it turns out the opposite is true: We have too little Christmas. In fact, one could make a compelling argument that America would be a much better country if Christmas were bigger, longer, and more evenly distributed across the calendar.

Let’s start with the economic data. In real terms, holiday-related consumer spending has been declining as a percentage of G.D.P. since the early 2000s, with inflation-adjusted per capita spending on gifts down about 12 percent from its 2005 peak. Eggnog consumption—a key indicator of seasonal festivity—is down 8 percent since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the average American household spent less time on holiday activities in 2023 than in 2010, according to a Pew study. So while people complain about Christmas being “too much,” the reality is that it is, in many ways, not enough.

Now consider the psychological and social benefits. Multiple studies have shown that people report feeling measurably happier during the holiday season. A 2018 study from the University of Chicago found that social connectedness and generosity peak in December, leading to temporary boosts in well-being and even productivity. Extending the Christmas season—perhaps even institutionalizing a second Christmas in July—could therefore have measurable benefits for public happiness. Some Scandinavian countries already do something like this with midsummer festivals, and they consistently rank among the happiest nations on earth.

There’s also a strong case for structural reform. Right now, Christmas is incredibly inefficient. It’s one massive, all-consuming day of celebration (or two, if you count Christmas Eve), with an enormous lead-up and then nothing afterward. December 26 is a dead zone. The transition back to normal work and life is abrupt and psychologically jarring. What if, instead of concentrating all our Christmas energy on one overburdened holiday, we spread it out more equitably across the calendar? A Christmas-like mini-holiday every three months—perhaps tied to quarterly economic cycles—could help stabilize consumer spending, improve national morale, and reduce the stress associated with last-minute shopping binges.

Of course, critics will say that extending Christmas would dilute its meaning. But historically, Christmas has always been adaptable. The Puritans banned it. The Victorians reinvented it. Coca-Cola gave Santa Claus a makeover. The modern Christmas season, with its Black Friday madness and streaming-service holiday rom-coms, bears little resemblance to the nineteenth-century version, let alone the medieval one. The real question is not whether Christmas should change but how it should evolve to maximize its social and economic utility.

Policy implications here are clear: We need a bigger, longer, better-distributed Christmas. We should explore tax incentives for off-season holiday spending, encourage regulatory frameworks that support Christmas expansion, and perhaps even rethink the fiscal year around a new Christmas-based economic model. More Christmas isn’t just good cheer—it’s good policy.


The Specter of Christmas Past

T*-N*H*S* C**T*S

I do not remember my first Christmas, but I remember the weight of it. The way the world seemed to slow, to breathe in its own cold air. I remember the glow of lights wrapped tight around the skeletal trees on our block, their illumination fragile, trembling, as though it could be extinguished at any moment. And I remember my father, grim-faced, precise, wrapping gifts with the exacting care of a man who believed in discipline above all else. His corners were always sharp. His tape was always hidden. I sometimes thought the gift was not what lay inside but the work itself, the act of making something orderly, controlled, in a world that refused to be either.

Because Christmas, too, belonged to the Dream—the Dream of a soft, red-cheeked America where every child found gifts beneath the tree, and every home was warmed by more than just the radiator’s groan. But that Dream was not ours. We were only renting space in it, allowed to pass through its snow-covered streets as guests, never as heirs.

When I was young, I watched the Christmas movies, the ones where small towns blanketed in a pure, unbroken whiteness seemed to exist for the sole purpose of joy. I saw the jolly department-store Santas, the roaring fireplaces, the wealth that was never spoken aloud but was present in the ease with which gifts were given and received. I saw families that never seemed to worry about eviction, about layoffs, about the way December’s cold settled deeper in bones already brittle from a lifetime of bracing against the world.

And yet, there was Christmas in West Baltimore. It was there in the neon flicker of corner-store decorations, in the battered artificial trees dusted off and set up in small apartments, their plastic needles thinning but still willing. It was in my mother’s laughter as she turned on the old holiday records, the vinyl spinning, the sound crackling with all the ghosts who had sung these same songs long before us. It was in my father’s hands as he carefully tied bows, as he placed gifts beneath the tree, gifts he had worked for, sweated for, in a city that was never made for men like him.

I did not know then that Christmas, too, was a battlefield. That the warmth of it, the supposed universality of it, was a thing unequally distributed. That there were children who woke up on December 25 to a world that had given them everything, and children who woke up to a world that had given them nothing but the lesson that some people are given nothing.

And yet, I still remember the feeling—the brief, trembling sense that for one night, at least, the world was softer, that the air was thick with something more than just cold, that we, too, could hold a piece of the Dream in our hands.

Even if we could not keep it.