Walking my dog during the Christmas season can be a troubling task to say the least. Not because of the bitter New England cold that bites relentlessly at my nose, nor because of the garish seasonal lights which—though blinding—are simple tribal affirmations shouted across quiet streets. What shakes me to my core is the glamorous tree glittering in the corner window of every home—and the child basking in its intimate glow who cannot help but believe.

Sentimental, sexy, sacrosanct—the Christmas tree stands alone in its symbolism, the stunning centerpiece of the holiday home wherein belief in the Big Man and his all-consuming Naughty-Nice Binary is first proclaimed and then consummated. Its destruction joyous, its erection ritual, its worship sedative, and its bounty orgasmic, the terror the tree inflicts upon the human spirit is total.

No living thing in the history of the natural world has gotten shafted harder than the tree. Trees give and give and give and receive nothing in return. Oxygen, shade, apples, almonds, maple syrup—not to mention stability for our soil and shelter for our birds. Taller than us, older than us, wiser than us—strengthened, not weakened, by the passing decades—nothing stands in the way of profit like the tree. Just look at the once-lush Manhattan. Lucrative real estate deals have always been the driving force behind the American Dream—from the Louisiana Purchase to Manifest Destiny—and nothing impedes that divine mandate more than two-thousand acres of old-growth forest and an indigenous population that believes in its sublimity.

It doesn’t matter that none of us will ever cut a deal to turn a state park into a country club. Like our children, nephews, and nieces just a few days ago, we too sit at the Kids Table, awaiting our call up to the big leagues, mimicking the more powerful with every flick of the fork. The child swigs his apple cider just as Aunt Kay swigs her martini; you deride the tax code just like your CEO who makes your salary in an hour does, convinced that appetite and appetite alone will one day seat us beside them. And as they survey public lands to pick apart from their private jets, we hop into the Highlander and hit the Christmas Tree Farm, where the firs await their fate in solemn rows.

You approach one that’s slightly taller than the rest because you have high ceilings you’d like people to notice. You slap its hard bark, pull its taut branches, finger its fragrant needles. The family rules unanimously in its favor. A smiling staff member glides over, chainsaw in hand, and offers his congratulations. It will make a beautiful tree. He rips the cord one, two, three times and your heart flutters a bit as that gas-powered baby roars to life. You squeeze your daughter’s hand as its teeth cut violently into the trunk like a knife through cake, revealing the bone white bark beneath. The whole family claps and cheers when the tree, severed from its roots, slams into the cold dirt. The slaughtered tree is strapped tight atop the family SUV and hauled home, carried into the house as a casket, placed in the perfect corner spot by the window for the neighborhood to see. They must know that we are true believers. Draped in white lights, dressed in silver and gold garland, the corpse is resurrected for a second, electrified life.

Your parents pull out the overstuffed ornament box and unfold each newspaper-wrapped piece with precision, expounding upon each. The corporate intersperses with the personal until they become indistinguishable, memory and mass consumption amalgamating into one: First grade photos: your son, gap-toothed, in a Calvin Klein polo; Minnie Mouse Mrs. Claus straight from the Magic Kingdom; your once loyal lab licking your face from a Chewy paw print frame; a slick polar bear in a beach chair guzzling a glass Coke; two CVS reindeer rubbing antlers above the words “Our First Christmas”— celebrating not the union of two lovers but the marriage of household to shopping cart. At its top is placed a star, an angel, or—for the truly masochistic—a regal, rotund Santa adorned in the finest threads. Finally, the shrine is complete.

We stand before its glory, a painted canvas only our family could create. The ornaments doused in the soft light induce in you a deep longing and charged expectation, the purity of the past and promise of the future radiating hotly from this fabled false idol that once swayed in the wind but now stands still by the fireplace, infused with a religiosity it never requested, projecting a meaning it cannot comprehend.

Your child sprints to it each afternoon after school, switching it on, staring up stupefied, suffused with hope and wonder and magic as she speaks aloud to Santa, exclaiming that she answered three questions in class today and made her bed like mommy asked, reiterating her request for the Easy Bake Oven. You stare at it in the quiet of the morning, as the Folgers in the coffee pot gurgles and drips. In its shine you grasp briefly the optimism and excitement of the once-loved season but it fades with the rumble of your automatic start. Eight more days until December 23, you tell yourself as you step into the polar vortex, taking one last look through the window, and then a whole nine days to spend with your family.

From our reverence we receive deliverance: We awake on Christmas morning to presents piled high beneath the tree, prayers answered, anxieties laid to rest. Your children tear into the presents monstrously, frantically, incoherently—still stopping to scrap over the first rip of a shared gift, negotiating every last drop of dopamine as they’ve been trained to do.

Your son wants the PS5 more than anything in the world and he’s absolutely shameless about it. He actively searches for it, shakes each box, questions aloud if each present could be the present. Every gift he opens that isn’t a PS5 or supplementary controller, game, or headset is opened with an aura of disappointment that the ungrateful little shit barely tries to conceal and immediately tossed off to the side with the other half-acknowledged, thoughtful gifts. It’s actually gross.

But you and your smirking wife know your role. When the last gift beneath the tree has been torn open, she reaches behind the sofa and suddenly “finds” one last box in what is a final, fatal flourish. The son explodes in ecstasy—trembling, shaking, convulsing—tears in his eyes as he tears off a salacious strip of snowflake wrapping paper to reveal the sleek white box underneath. He plants a wet kiss on the box, prostrates himself on the carpet, and bellows his thanks up to the Big Man, birthed anew beneath the branches. The mother, relegated to midwife, beams. Rewarded by the Binary, the child is seized by it.

The Christmas tree trains us and the Christmas tree tortures us, a beacon to our own bondage we are too blind to see. We erect these spectral husks in our homes, offices, and squares. We pose in front of them, rock around them, ice skate under them. Our dogs sleep at their feet. We sing their praises, eat their frosted cakes, and marvel at their glimmering brilliance, never stopping to contemplate the uncompromising ethos of spiritual and ecological extraction that underpins their uncontested ubiquity. To question the tree is to question the chainsaw, and to question the chainsaw is blasphemy.

Besieged by gingerbread and peppermint, I sought refuge in the bread aisle, only to witness a common Christmastime occurrence play out in front of my very eyes. In front of the ciabatta, a six-year-old screamed. Ostensibly about a box of hot fudge sundae Poptarts abandoned two aisles over.

His mother was helpless. She begged, pleased, groveled before him in what was frankly a pitiful display, but the child—a consumer, first and foremost—could not unlearn his learned behavior. Many spectators began leaving the bread aisle due to discomfort at this point but I lingered. Not just because the ciabatta was the very bread I needed and there was only a single loaf left, but because I had a sneaking suspicion of how this would end.

“You’re gonna be on the Naughty List,” she shrieked. “Santa’s watching, so you better stop.”

And the child stopped.

In the earliest years of meaning making, the child is indoctrinated within the Naughty-Nice Binary, a social credit system rivaled by only China, inflicted upon the child by a corporatized holiday both practical and existential in its threats.

The child learns early, almost immediately, the rules of the game. Don’t shout. Don’t cry. Don’t pout. And you will be rewarded. Santa Claus will come to town and you will be bestowed with gifts and it will the best day of the year.

And that’s what it’s about, too. Not just the material good but the stigma—the not having. So when your father tells you he’s got a direct line to Santa and he’s not still not too happy about how you whipped a contested king-sized Kit Kat at your sister’s face on Halloween—he’s not just threatening you with no Nintendo Gamecube. He’s threatening you with social ostracism and that is actually abusive, by the way.

But if the child is nice, everything is just dandy, right? He is permitted to take part in the ritual, the social rite that is the customary enumeration of presents amongst his friends on January 2 when they return to school. He’ll be made fun of, of course, for eagerly wearing not one but two new clothing articles on the first day back, but nonetheless his status within the group will be affirmed. But what of the child who returns to school in January with nothing—no fresh Nikes, no EnV touch, and certainly no smile?

Well, they were naughty.

Johnny didn’t get anything but he never does his homework and is on like the 4 times tables and gets lunch for free and it’s kind of bullshit, so maybe that’s why he didn’t get anything for Christmas.

Or Billy? Who appallingly switched his Pokemon socks to Yu-Gi-Oh ones in the middle of the reading rug mid Strega Nona. Who told the teacher to shut up and would bang his head on the table during lunch well and also didn’t do his homework well, yeah, def naughty.

Oh and you can’t forget Manny, that fucking lunatic, who every couple of weeks would just go off, flip his desk, pummel the whiteboard, tear the pencil sharpener out of the wall and hum it at the teacher’s head. He once took off straight down the hallway and out the door and didn’t reappear until high school. Not exactly nice behavior.

So yeah. It makes sense these kids aren’t coming back from Christmas break with new shoes and shirts. They suck. We did our homework. We did our chores. We played by the rules. We deserve these gifts.

And so we march. In lockstep, into adulthood, invigorated by our common identity, indestructible in our ideology of intrinsic worth. We worked hard, we paid our taxes, we contributed to society. We were good. And that’s why we have this Grand Cherokee, and this suburban house, and this pool and this boat and vacation home and that mom—that shameless mom over there begging for $15 an hour, who’s using her EBT on Oreos, for fuck’s sake—she was naughty, we were nice.

Good and bad, winners and losers, the haves and the have-nots. The Naughty-Nice Binary stratifies us and insists its judgment is just, leaving one half othered, the other ordained. It is the central, dominating myth of Christmas, and it is with this myth that the Big Man damns us, flicking his finger left to right as we step off the Polar Express and onto the ice.

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I’m on my fourth Manhattan and I need to vent. My daughter decided to use her last Christmas movie ticket tonight, one of three she is given for the season. We let her pick whatever she wants, although there are a few nonstarters (Home Alone, A Christmas Story, and, of course, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). The system has worked for us, and her last pick is always The Polar Express, which toes the line with the train transportation stuff but is for the most part benign.

Tonight—curveball—she requests Elf. It’s Will Ferrell, so I’m immediately on guard. I think and think and think trying to remember its plot but all my primate brain can remember is Zooey Deschanel in the shower and the humiliation of Miles Finch (we’ll get to both of those). I express concern to my wife and she pleads with me to loosen up. She even tells me “don’t ruin Christmas” which she knows I fucking hate. I don’t want to a fight so I agree thinking why not, how bad can it be? As it turns out, Birth of a Nation bad.

I’m fucked up so I’m doing bullet points:

• Snowball fight scene — Even funny-guy Ferrell need remind us of American military might. This one is boiling with that distinct flavor of militant American nationalism post 9/11, the very same mania for justice that brought Baghdad to its knees. The transmutation of snow ball into machine gun fights the same ideological battle as McClane and McCallister: that which integrates Christmas with a justified, lustful violence, distorting it from a day to be enjoyed into a way of life that must be defended. That Michael was attacked first, and that Buddy, in response, strafes the streets of New York City with disproportionate and indiscriminate firepower to the laughter of the crowd, testifies to the same civic derangement that would shrug off the War on Terror and defend the War on Drugs

• The “Special Someone Gag.” Gross. I’m not talking about the thought of Walter strutting about in some seasonal lingerie, but the crude heteronormativity of it all. Doing so can actually be quite erotic, even earth-shatteringly-so. That’s not to suggest that I’ve tried it, of course—I’ve simply taken numerous gender studies courses. The offense here is that Buddy tried to express connection to his father through a genuine gesture—one free from the constraints of debilitating American sexual mores—and was instead met with mockery, as those who go against the grain always are. It teaches my daughter a dangerous lesson, too: men don’t wear lingerie. So who does? Women.

• Miles Finch scene. Just the lowest-hanging of fruit. A creative genius reduced his stature, character development—not to mention humanity—denied in the name of a slapstick gag. Discourse that descends needlessly into violence, all because an intransigent zealot who puts chocolate sauce on his spaghetti can’t admit that he’s the one living in fantasyland and not the other way around. Dinklage played Tyrion Lannister with such conviction for a reason.

• Jovie — The moment I saw her placing the star atop the tree I knew her clothes were coming off. Admittedly, as above-mentioned, I hadn’t exactly forgotten the scene, but its existence speaks to the dominance of the male gaze. Even in a Christmas movie, even during Christmas, a beautiful blond with penetrating blue eyes and the sultriest of voices—you gotta give the boys something. Let’s compound this offense by having Buddy barge in on her, stay sing the Date Rape Anthem, and remain there when she expresses shock, discomfort, and fear. Don’t be fooled by the stunningly tender harmony—there is nothing consensual about this encounter.

• After Buddy commits battery on the previous Santa, the mall’s manager, proving devotion and loyalty to the store and its owners who sustain him, takes up the mantle of Claus. His portrayal is surprisingly convincing, yet this is played for a joke. Why?

• Buddy gets hammered in the mail room, perpetuating both underage drinking (Buddy is child coded) and working class stereotypes

• The Rockefeller Tree and the ice skating. One of the most appalling of all our Christmas images, brought to you by Hollywood. This image perhaps more than anything else has come to symbolize the quintessential holiday romance: gloved hands intertwined, gliding across a plaza built with oil money, beneath the decaying bark of a once grand tree marched through the city streets as a slain beast, brought to you by Hallmark and Kay Jewelers. Buddy enacts this ritual of manufactured intimacy by kissing Jovie on the ice, completing the union of spectacle and joy. That Buddy is a creep, a fool, a fundamentalist, and a virgin makes no difference to Jovie any longer. Enchanted, entranced, she sleepwalks into her own submission.

Yet the severity of Elf lies not in just its sexism, racism, or ableism, but in the very ethos that underlies its entire animation. Even Elf must instill ideology. How does it end?

The Big Man crashes in central park. His engine that runs on Christmas spirit has fallen off, devoid of fuel. The Central Park Rangers, the very foot-soldiers of state-power and regulation Claus so deeply despises, are in pursuit. And who comes along but Buddy, the outcast, who could never be a true elf. Does he help his former employer? Or does he leave him there to cuffs around his fat wrists?

It can’t get more obvious: He literally finds the engine. Buddy reattaches it, hops on top of the sleigh, and the reindeer begun running, the horsemen still at their heels. Yet the sleigh trundles along, still out of fuel. Buddy’s individual affirmation to the system satisfies us narratively—but for the sleigh to fly—for the the season to be saved—the whole world must profess their faith. Yet how does one convince the world?

Jovie stands up, clothed, and begins to sing:

You better watch out, you better not cry

You better not pout, I’m telling you why

Santa Claus is coming to town

And these New Yorkers gathered in Central Park—the beating heart of the country, if not the world—sing too. First just the mom, then Michael, then the crowd, then the guys down at the post office, the authors at the publishing house, the little girl in her pajamas, laying in bed. They sing not a carol but a creed, not to each other but to a god and the way of life that he—by watching us, judging us, and rewarding us—sustains. We are your slaves, they shout into the night, and the engine roars to life.

Don’t watch this with your kids.

On Christmas day 2001 I awoke with that same familiar rush of anticipation that always accompanied Christmas morning. I raced downstairs alongside my brother and sister to the living room, to the sight of presents piled high beneath the tree.

I sighed with relief. The preceding year had been a particularly fraught one for me, and I knew I hadn’t been good. Whether it was the awakening hormones of a young boy or the repression of the nuclear family is impossible to say, but the year was one defined by drama—clashes with siblings, groundings from parents, a disconcertingly recent battle in a bowling alley just nine days ago that ended with my father dragging the whole family out with an hour still left on the clock.

I had spent the weeks leading up to Christmas overcome with anxiety, crying to my parents about how I couldn’t be on the naughty list, how terrified I was of receiving coal, but the presents under the tree finally had assuaged my fears. My father handed me Santa’s first gift, a small square box done up in ribbon, and I couldn’t help but smile.

I undressed the box sensually, savoring it as I always did. My first thought was a special baseball, perhaps a decorated one straight from the Red Sox gift shop. Or maybe a brand new glistening ornament to hang high on the family tree. Yet as I lifted the top off the gift box I was only met with blackness.

It was a single piece of coal. Dark, dense, deathly in its composition—an undeniable indictment of my very existence. I held the cold piece of carbon in my hand and brought my gaze up to my father, who fixed his steely gaze on mine and slowly shook his head. Then I burst into tears.

Coal represents the endgame of the totalitarian tradition that is Christmas, the consequence through which the Naughty-Nice apparatus is given its teeth. It is the gift of nothingness, the antithesis of the present, and imparts a lesson that is social, ecological, and theological in its terror.

There is first the social element of receiving coal. To be on the Naughty List and receive no gifts is one thing—to receive coal is another altogether. It is the material embodiment of the binding apparatus in which all children are enrolled, a symbol of dirt, filth, and industry that makes the child’s condemnation concrete. The child who is threatened with coal is not just threatened with social ostracism, as parental invocations of the Naughty List also promise, but with shame and humiliation, a physical reminder of his failure to participate as prescribed in the complicated, complex world.

Its message is also ecological. That the transgressors are not threatened with rocks or onions or shit but instead with a natural resource complicit in a destruction they do not yet know about should surprise nobody. They had the balls to make it coal for a reason. The gift of coal reminds us of the cost of our consumption and our enslavement to it. They mock our children and their futures with this poisonous symbol, and we do not protest but play along.

Yet the social and ecological threats of coal are dwarfed by its religious connotation—the outcome that awaits the child if he or she is not good. The child at whose year end steps into the living room to face either present or punishment reflects the adult at whose life’s end steps up to the Pearly Gates to face Saint Peter. Coal teaches, habituates, and finally conditions, a microcosm of fury and retribution that prepares the child for a lifetime in which the consequence for nonconformity is not just nothing good for one day but everything bad forever. To be surveilled, to be judged, to be condemned to suffering is not the stuff of authoritarian regimes but the throwaway line of an overworked parent, banal yet brutalizing in effect.

That coal is the product of Christian myth is no accident. The child who begins to doubt Santa—mocked by his peers for still believing—who finally, tearfully confronts his parents about their lies on the stairs at the age of seven is freed only briefly. He is seamlessly swept up into the system of control that is the church—a dogma his peers dare not question.

Santa’s chair at the mall is replaced by the confession booth, coal substituted for eternal flames. The child is again immobilized by fear, subjugated by the specter of divine judgment. He doesn’t want to go to hell but it all just feels a little bit fucking weird which makes him even more scared of hell for thinking it but he can’t help thinking it. He’s really watching? He really cares if covet my neighbor’s wife? Does Bobby’s girlfriend count? Eternal damnation, for checking out Abby Carter’s legs in geometry?

Reconciliation, the celebrated Sacrament, plays over and over in his head too, where he, head in his hands, admitted to looking at page 88 of the 2002 Guinness Book of World Records—in which Heidi Klum models the world’s most expensive bra—just a bit too frequently. He broke down into tears, swearing he would be better, begging not to burn forever. The priest was surprisingly chill about it—only three Hail Marys—but the doubts lingered. What kind of loving God would send me to hell for this?

The Bible and the Christmas traditions its central story spawned are not fundamental laws nor sacred texts but polemics against human flourishing cloaked in the language of eternity and salvation. They are authoritarian creeds, from Revelation to Romans to “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”, wielded as cudgels, cracked as whips.

Santa is watching, so is God.

Behave.

It’s Christmas Eve, the kids asleep soundly in their rooms. Snow covers the ground. The stars glitter above. Not a creature stirs. You and your wife completed the checklist just an hour ago: stockings stuffed, presents wrapped, cookies munched. She now dreams peacefully beside you. Content, sated, your heart impossibly full, you await the fleeting euphoria of the morning.

Then you hear it. The handle jiggling. The knob turning. The front door creaking open, ever so slowly. A visitor at this hour can only mean one thing—and he ain’t coming down the fucking chimney.

Masked, malicious, most certainly a minority, the man slips in, beelining it to the blinking tree. He begins shoveling gift after gift into his giant bag. The Lego T-Rex, the Jellycat German Shepherd, the seafoam Yeti. It all goes in. Relentlessly. Ravenously. Unforgivably. Nearly complete in his crimes, he slings the bag over his shoulder and creeps back to the front door.

But you’re standing on the landing, Sig Sauer in hand.

BANG.

The hollow-point hits him center mass. He flies backward, bounces off the wall, then spins frantically, bursting through the screen door into the front yard, still defiantly clinging to the bag of presents.

You kick through the door, scanning the front yard, fingering the trigger. A crimson trail lit by your front porch light meanders through the marred white snow, coming to a stop in a shadowy spot next to the twinkling herd of rattan reindeer grazing in the lawn. The bastard is lying on the ground, grunting, moaning, clutching his chest.

You put the gun to his head. “Please,” he pleads. “Call an ambulance. Please, I’m sorry. I just—.” He coughs, violently. “Please. Sir, please. An ambulance—I just wanted something to give my daugh—”

BANG.

He crumples into the snow. You pick up the bag of presents—still intact—and march back to the house. Behind you, your home’s red and green lights glimmer off his lifeless eyes.

Merry Christmas, you whisper.

There is no American vice which Christmas does not sanctify, our fetishization of the Second Amendment chief among them. Hollywood, of course, plays an essential role in the stoking our most barbarous Yuletide fantasies. This phenomenon is most recently observed in films such as Violent Night (2022) and Red One (2024), but the intertwinement of Christmas with violence is an old, old story.

Let us begin with Ralphie in A Christmas Story, the All-American Aryan boy in the quintessential American family. Ralphie craves but one thing for Christmas: the Red Ryder Rifle, a BB gun modeled after the weapon-of-choice of the eponymous Western cowboy, who dispenses justice in a lawless frontier with his reliable redskin by his side. This comic strip hero turned cultural colossus would go on to star in 27 films in under a decade, a feat of excess born from greed, cultural rot, and a dying moral order that would put Iron Man to shame.

Steeped in fantasies of an anarchic land in which justice and peace can only be found in the barrel of the gun, Red Ryder instilled in Ralphie’s generation a conception of violence that was both uncompromising and concrete: Bad guys are bad, and the good guys shoot them. Ralphie’s parents, teacher, and even Santa express dismay at the practical if not moral hazards of such a gift. Ralphie’s repeated request is met with the same answer: You’ll shoot your eye out. Yet in the end, he is granted his wish, gifted the gun by his reluctant parents in a fit of Christmas morning bliss. Upon finally firing that first fateful shot, the bullet ricochets and strikes his face. Yet Ralphie, miraculously, is okay—it only strikes his glasses. Had he actually lost an eye, we may not be here.

Then, of course, there is Die Hard, which lives on in our discourse through the eternal debate: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? That such a controversy even exists—that it could be a Christmas movie—speaks volumes to an insidious societal sickness, the same warped worldview that puts forth arming teachers as practical policy. The office building, the airport, the elementary school, no place is safe, no place can be safe—it can only be defended.

Yet the most far-reaching of this myth-making manifests in 1990’s Home Alone, a holiday classic that features Kevin McAllister (MacCaulay Culkin), a 12-year-old boy left behind while his family spends Christmas in Paris, forced to defend his home from the “bloodthirsty” Wet Bandits.

Their object was property, their worst crimes flooding insured homes and stealing jewelry boxes. Yet in America there is no graver sin, and so we cheer and we fist bump and we foam at the mouth every Christmas as we watch this prepubescent sadist torture two human beings alongside our cocoa-sipping children. We high-five when a down-on-his-luck burglar with no shoe and no tetanus shot steps on a nail barefoot. We howl at a petty thief (one too decent to even utter an actual curse) whose head is bashed in by an iron bar. Extrajudicial, cruel and unusual—it makes no difference to us. He was a kid and they were criminals. They were Naughty and he was Nice.

The world is under siege and so we must find serenity in steel. The films that flicker across our screens each Christmas night as the fireplace crackles flash the same lustful fantasy of sanctified violence, a fanaticism born from fury and fear, fundamental in our law and fundamental in its depravity. Red Ryder, Ralphie, McCallister, McClane—the Good Guy with a Gun looms large in our collective consciousness, watching over us, protecting us, hearing our prayers—as another homily is disrupted by gunfire, as a career cop cowers outside of a Texas school. He promises order in a lawless land. He grants control in a world of chaos. He absolves us but he does not save us.

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Remote, below zero, depressingly dark for half the year—the North Pole as the headquarters for a global toy enterprise was always stupid as shit. Santa could have picked central, logistical hubs like New York City or London, or Canada or Scandinavia if the wintry aesthetic really mattered to his brand—yet he instead selected an extreme end of the Earth, a place inhospitable and unreachable, anathema to human and elven flourishing alike.

The North Pole was chosen not because the white ice so nicely complements Santa’s carefully curated corporate red, nor because its inspiring isolation enables him to work peacefully and productively, but because of twisted economic incentive and the undeniable signal that setting up shop in one of the world’s most fragile ecosystem sends. And that message is: fuck you. Santa’s Workshop is no little mom-and-pop shop but a full-fledged factory, and the belief that its operation in an already abused Arctic climate could be anything but destructive is simple fantasy.

Santa is the apotheosis of the oligarch, his polar kingdom the climax of a Koch-induced wet dream. He sits atop vast oil reserves, close by and friendly to Russia, and, most importantly, far from the reach of any overzealous government agency or tax authority. No smug OSHA official is knocking on his door asking to speak to the overworked elf who ended his 36-hour shift with candy cane shards in his back. No SEC agent is flying in, wielding a badge and grilling the Big Man about his cryptocurrency, Nicecoin, that he’s been shilling to kids. Certainly no meddling EPA bureaucrat come to enforce their stupid clean little acts, questioning the polyester pumped into the sky, the gigatons of glitter dumped into the sea. And the IRS? Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho. Far away from our towns and cities he sits, unaccountable, untouchable, fattening his stomach, lining his pockets, pillaging his pole.

We know what it is that we allow him to do. We understand the unspeakable cost of this intoxicating industrial might we so shamelessly and fervently beseech, this insatiable hunger that defines the Christmas season and has defined our lives, the absolute logic of production at the expense of preservation that drives this desensitized age.

We crave so much the serenity of ripping into that seductive, suspected Stanley mug sparkling under the tree that we witness him plunder the tundra and we shrug. It is a consummation needed so deeply that we forgive an ecocide for it. He blackens the snowy owls with soot, he chokes the sun-soaked seals with microplastics, he melts the glistening sea ice and reduces our once proud polar bears to bones. The Colorado runs dry, the Amazon burns, and the glaciers vanish, but that’s simply the cost of a Chevy truck, two-day-shipping, and a holly jolly Christmas.

The color white means a lot to the everyday American. White is one third of the Stars and Stripes, the dove that returns with the olive branch, the breathtaking dress your wife wore on her wedding day. How can a dispassionate academic such as myself castigate the color white when it represents everything pure and good and innocent in this world? That’s precisely the problem.

The indisputable fact is this song is destructive because of the explicit, singular, and most importantly exalting emphasis it places on whiteness. This narrative of white as pure, white as enchanting, white as dreamlike, white as holy, even—repeated generation after generation, December night after December night—has instilled into our collective cultural conscience dangerous, dangerous notions about good and evil. The subtext is what matters here, and the subtext in this Christmas classic has always been obvious: white is right. It’s no accident a song relevant for one month of the year is the best-selling single of all time.

But context, they scream. It’s about snow and sleigh bells and glistening tree tops, not skin color. All he’s doing is wishing for a tranquil snowfall. Context matters, doesn’t it? Of course it does. And I would never deny that, on its surface, Bing’s bigoted bop appears to be nothing more than a festive if lackluster little carol. But as students of history and culture it is incumbent upon us to dig deeper. The song topped the charts in 1942— is segregation sufficient context for you?

The symbols we adopt matter. I taught in the inner-city several years ago. It was December 17 and I was playing “White Christmas” before class started, the Drifters version. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, just trying to spread a little cheer. Then one of my students, Damar, shuffled up to me shyly as we waited for the bell. He looked down at his off-brand Jordans, his dreads dangling over his dark forehead not unlike unlit holiday lights adorning a rooftop. “Why’s it always a white Christmas they be dreaming about,” he said. I didn’t have an answer.

But wait. The Drifters. What about their version of the song, immortalized in 1990’s Home Alone (a holiday “classic” that romanticizes violence in defense of property in a way that is uniquely and hideously American). The Drifters are black and they’re also dreaming of a white Christmas so maybe I’m just whack, right? Wrong. That is actually even more problematic, but such an argument is beyond the scope of this piece and likely the comprehension of a large swath of the audience so just trust me on this one. It’s not okay.

Let’s finish with a thought experiment. I want you to close your eyes, and then I want you to picture this: black snow. Black snowflakes coming down on Christmas morning, blanketing the barren trees. Black mounds piled high beside your mailbox. Black snowmen in the neighborhood yards, puffing on corn cob pipes from dawn to dusk. Feels a bit…unsettling, doesn’t it?

Why?

The hard, hard truth is that when you wake up on Christmas morning to see the cars and the street covered in a fresh coat of untouched snow, you think it’s aesthetic pleasure making your heart flutter. But the truth is our perception is far too intricately and intimately intertwined with a cultural conception that sanctifies whiteness for us to truly know if it’s beautiful or not. In other words, when you’re singing along to a white singer driving around the white part of town taking in the pretty white lights on the pretty white houses and the pristine white snow on the ground, there is almost certainly a subconscious part of you, despite how festive and benevolent you might feel, that understands you’re singing about more than just snow, and that’s why you really feel so merry.

But maybe I’m crazy. Maybe the song’s message is truly just one of good will and nostalgia and a longing for simpler times. Maybe it’s just a holiday blessing. Its last line proclaims “May all your Christmases be white,” after all. But that sounds an awful lot like a dogwhistle to me.

I had my first encounter with mistletoe when I was 17. One of my friends was hosting a Christmas party and my crush was there, a scorching hot ginger. She and I were standing by the table talking and I don’t know if it was her or the holiday spirit but something felt different about that night. She was wearing reindeer ears that jingled every time she tilted back her head to laugh.

Our friends must have planned it in advance because as we were talking they abruptly left the kitchen. She and I were so lost in conversation we didn’t even notice. A moment later, they called the two of us into the living room. As we walked through the doorway, we found them silent, facing us, waiting for something. Then we looked up.

I’ll never forget the red berries.

She gasped. My face went hot. She looked up at me, her ears jingling, and an electric possibility enveloped the room. Then, in my direction, a drift. Slow, subtle, imperceptible, even, but a drift nonetheless, her body moving ever so slowly toward mine, a Christmas wish come true. Yet underneath this symbol of male fertility and vitality I stood frozen. Sweaty. Scared. This wasn’t how I’d imagined it. No beach, no sunset, no passionate confession. Just a plant. And an audience. And her. I couldn’t make a move, not there, not in front of all of my friends. I had never kissed a girl.

She paused, and the moment dissipated, her gaze drifting downward in disappointment. Then, my friends began laughing. Horrifyingly, I was erect.

I’m not ashamed to share this story. Indeed, I’m proud to share it if it allows me to broadcast a message that may one day save a life: keep the mistletoe at home. It’s not fun. It’s not romantic. It’s not sexy. You never know if the people walking under it are comfortable kissing in front of others or how their bodies might respond to such a possibility. Couples should avoid participating, too, as the tradition reinforces the belief that sexual action—and the precursor to it—can be coerced by both peer pressure and pseudoreligious patriarchal customs deeply rooted in misogyny.

I understand that some may find the prospect of a mistletoe kiss exhilarating. Believe me, I fantasized about more than just kissing under it for much of my young life. But when you’re actually up there, in that position, on display, and you see them watching you and her moving closer and your heart starts beating faster and you feel a biological response occurring that you are powerless to stop—that is not only nonconsensual but traumatic. During Christmas season, a quarter century later, my eyes still shoot straight to the top of every doorway I enter.

Mistletoe stages a scene without consent, assigns a role without warning, demands a performance in which our sexuality and festivity are declared to the delight of the crowd. To fail to kiss the girl is to be mocked as gay, or Scrooge, or deviant. To this day I wonder what would have happened if nobody had been watching.

In 2005, a children’s book titled The Elf on the Shelf introduced its eponymous new Christmas character: a merry little Elf dispatched to the home by Santa Claus to monitor children in the lead-up to the big day. The Elf travels each night under the cover of darkness to the North Pole to brief the Big Man personally on the child’s day, their best moments, worst moments, most wanted gifts. At dawn, he returns to the home to hide until morning when the children awake and joyously hunt for him in a game of hide-and-seek. The book comes with a physical elf doll, which children are encouraged to name and parents encouraged to treat as real, the family compelled not to imagine a story but enact belief.

Over the following decade, this little-known picture book exploded into a full-blown phenomenon, a newfound 21st century tradition spawned by the swirling forces of social media and economic insecurity. Intoxicated by the promise of Pinterest and Facebook, reeling from the Great Recession, and starved for order, the American people searched for a story to help make sense of a chaotic, changing world. The Elf on the Shelf, leering, reached out from our laptops and grabbed us by the throat. Today, its humble creators are worth 100 million dollars.

The Elf on the Shelf is described as a scout—an undeniably martial term that signals the coming invasion, occupation, and finally annexation of the child’s inner life. At the behest of the Big Man, the elves are sent into the home, material reminders of his omniscience and our own impotence, lest we begin to question both. What we as children in our misbehaving moments imagine naively as a general goodwill and leniency on Santa’s part with regards to our conduct is eviscerated by the eagle-eyed Elf watching eagerly from the ceiling fan. He’s returning to the North Pole tonight, report in hand, detailing every last one of your transgressions. Mom might’ve not heard you muttering “stupid” under your breath when she asked you to bring your plate to the sink but he did and he’s gonna fucking bury you.

Behind enemy lines, the Elf operates without decorum and with impunity, afforded privileges and excesses denied to the child. He passes out in a pool of sugar on the kitchen counter, binges Netflix until sunrise, builds a pillow fort beside the bed from which to collect intelligence as your daughter dreams. Once sacred places for french toast breakfasts, family movie nights, and bedtime stories in which meaning was found in food, film, and fairy tale are thus contorted into sites of submission, an intrusion upon our most intimate spaces that is accepted, welcomed, and celebrated in the name of Christmas.

School is supposed to be a sanctuary but the elves are waiting there, too. Your kid’s teacher has two, Romeo and Juliet, who are found each morning in a frenzy. Romeo peers down from the whiteboard with a Christmas tree scrawled across it; Juliet somehow slips into Sarah’s backpack and tries to steal her snack. The elves remain for the entire day, unmoving, somehow even more unsettling than the principal slipping in mid-class and jotting notes quietly in the back. The child tries to focus on The Polar Express reading but can’t stop fixating on the elves. Did they see when he copied an answer off Katie’s paper, whispered a joke to Johnny, stared longingly at Sally and her mesmerizing curls? They can’t possibly see everything, the child reassures himself, but when he glances at the whiteboard he meets Romeo’s cold gaze.

Who is the Elf on the Shelf? Nobody knows for sure. Elves, ostensibly. Like the ones in Santa’s workshop, maybe just with more of an edge. They wear only red—their pants striped, hats pointed, cheeks fat and flushed. They carry no warrant and no identification, only the mandate of the season. Are they true believers who despise the naughty as we all should because they vie for gifts they did not earn? Are they strict devotees to the Big Man and the vision of a once-white Christmas to which he promises a return? Or are they simply morons too stupid to build a rocking horse who opted to stake out the bus stop in a blacked-out Cadillac instead? Their interrogators are inevitably met with the same frigid refrain: they work for Santa Claus.

If the Elf is touched he loses his magic—his aura of invincibility shattered by the brush of a fingertip. This is the one thing the child must never do. Drained of his life force, the Elf cannot make the nightly trip back to the North Pole, placing Christmas in jeopardy for the entire household. The official website puts forth only the possibility of an accidental touch, because intentionally touching the mystical, ogling being using your toothbrush is inconceivable in this universe. To challenge the elf is to embrace destitution.

Thus the giddy little boy who finds the Elf playing Xbox in the basement lurches from rapture to terror in an instant upon realizing that in his blind ecstasy he has gripped the grinning Elf in his fist. He flings it onto the couch like a risky text only to slowly bring his eyes up from the shadow on the floor. His big brother is standing over him, slack-jawed and wide-eyed. The little brother’s face goes hot as the Elf twitches violently on the couch; the tears begin to flow as he drops to his knees and begins to beg. It was an accident, he didn’t mean to, it was only for a second, the elf is okay, please don’t tell Mom, please, please, please don’t tell Mom—but his big brother is already sprinting up the stairs.

The Elf can be saved, of course. All the child has to do is repent. A heartfelt written apology to Santa or the stricken creature himself will do. Canonically, that’s the quickest way to get the magic back! Don’t ask questions. Don’t make excuses. Just admit wrongdoing, and you’ll still get the iPad. Children too young to compose a letter can perform an act of religious worship instead, and the whole family must take part, for the child’s sin extends to us all. We must sing a carol together because the elves love song and cheer. Surrounding the tree, singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, the Elf rises again, nourished by the harmony of the very family he degrades.

The parent, as always, is complicit in this derangement, not a mere ideological ally but an active collaborator: hiding the Elf each morning, dishing out lore like crack, justifying its indiscretions time and time again. The most perverse parents post these acts of faith to their stories and reels, videos of them constructing toilet paper thrones and filling the kitchen sink with Swiss Miss, basking in the attention and validation brought on by this children’s book turned dick-measuring contest.

The kids are finally asleep and mom sits on the couch by the tree, pinot grigio in one hand and iPhone in the other. Drunk on wine and drunk on Christmas spirit, she adds an elf-sized baking sheet to her Amazon cart that will arrive just in time for breakfast, notifications still popping off from this morning’s post of the Elf riding the family’s chocolate lab. Upstairs, in bed, her daughter pulls her Frozen blanket up to her chin, wondering if the Elf has arrived at the North Pole, praying aloud for him not to tell Santa about the fight she had with her brother after school. She drifts off with more comforting thoughts of Christmas morning only to jolt upright two hours later when the tightly shut bedroom door creaks open. It’s just the wind, she tells herself, but when she falls back asleep she dreams of a boot on her throat.

Parade

On the streets of New York City, the season of subjugation begins with spectacle. The public roads are barricaded, sidewalks swept of cigarette butts and bums, wreaths hung, lights strung, and trees erected—the avenues awash in a sparkling, comforting splendor. The most devoted flock like pilgrims to the dazzling, dangerous metropolis, lining the route in mittens, scarves, and diapers, or shelling out thousands for a hotel room from which to take in the magnificent march through an iPhone lens.

At home, the once-flourishing turkey simmers in the oven, suffusing the neighboring rooms with a savory aroma at once nostalgic and promising. We flip the television on mechanically, instinctually, just as our own fathers did. Our children stare mesmerized at the glass, drinking in the perverted pageantry unblinkingly. Militaristic high school bands march in lockstep, blasting “Let It Snow” and “Winter Wonderland” off the skyscrapers, throwing in a “God Bless America” for good measure; the NYPD’s own come next, brass in their hands and steel on their hips; Sabrina Carpenter—in a satin slip—lip syncs a half-heard, somehow even hornier rendition of “Santa Baby.” Ohtani, Oprah, and the Pillsbury Doughboy, swaddled in Canada Goose, cruise by in a convertible Porsche, waving coldly to the Corolla owners clamoring from behind the barriers.

Pikachu, Snoopy, Spongebob—bloated and lifeless—hover through Midtown Manhattan beside the high-rises, grappled down by minimum-wage workers, peeking into windows, looming over us as gods. Our children jump and shout and press their fingers to the screen with delight and we smile at these fun, familiar faces. That Pikachu is returned to a suffocating Pokeball, that Snoopy can only dream of glory from atop his doghouse, and that Spongebob languishes as an underpaid fry cook in a chronically understaffed kitchen is of no concern to us. We only look up, awestruck, and mouth our thank yous to the powers-that-be. Who lives in a pineapple under the sea.

The parade ends, as it of course must, with Santa Claus. Fat, lecherous, draped in a show-stopping red and white suit—also Canada Goose—the Big Man tracks forward on the final float, his faithful, haggard elves beside him, no Mrs. Claus in sight. He waves and bellows and guffaws and casts his watchful gaze out over the merry mob below as they clap and shout and cheer his name, greeted as a king in a land that claims none. The celebration of Thanksgiving thus begins not with gratitude for the good fortune of today but with mania for the spoils of tomorrow. Santa Claus has come to town, brought to you by Macy’s, and he will come again.

Feast

In the United States of America, circus must always be accompanied by bread: the Super Bowl and buffalo wings, burgers and fireworks on the Fourth, the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the afternoon feast.

The turkey, golden brown, basted in its own fat, stuffed with the finest delicacies, is pulled tantalizingly from the oven. The table is set meticulously, methodically, expectantly—not unlike rose petals on a hotel bed. We sit before the beleaguered bird, gripping our forks and licking our lips. Your cousin snaps a video of the Instagram-worthy spread. The final plate is filled and only then do we indulge, greedily and gutturally, mopping up the gravy with thick slabs of meat, gulping down eggnog, guzzling corn, going up for seconds, thirds, and even fourths in the case of a voracious, vulgar uncle. Conversation flows only after the wine has, its contents dictated by the abundance before us: Uncle Kevin’s retirement glossed over but his candied yams praised; Aunt Kay’s fourth martini unmentioned, her carrots glazed. And—oh my God—the rolls.

Beside you, at the Kids Table, the children enact the ritual in miniature, animatedly and uncritically: they scoff down mac and cheese, swig Sprite, speak of their Christmas lists as shareholders, relishing the warmth and wonder and excitement of the coming month (except your niece who throws a fit over the green beans and refuses to even touch the plate. Your sister, heartbreakingly, makes her a Toaster Strudel).

The feast ends. We sit stuffed, sated. Is it now time to talk, to laugh, to take joy in each other’s company? Of course not. The women, their soles sore, stay in the kitchen to scrub the plates. The men migrate to the couch to watch the Cowboys and Lions deliver false hope yet again. Your drunk cousin pulls up Fanduel every five minutes to check his Turkey Day Parlay, screaming in rage when that piece of fucking shit CeeDee Lamb goes down at the 40 with a torn ACL, failing to secure the seventh reception and $150 payout that was so close he could almost taste it. Commercials bombard us between literally every snap, all Christmas-themed: Santa Claus Kit Kats, diamond rings gifted by the Rockefeller tree, an $80,000 Telluride carving through the blizzarding Rockies to the tune of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

The tryptophan, Tito’s, and THC gummies weave their soporific spell, lulling us mercifully, just as the rest of the family migrates into the living room. We sink into the couch in a post-coital stupor, pass interference calls mingling with clanking dishes and distant conversations. From somewhere far off, somebody says something about dessert. As you drift off to sleep, your phone buzzes with a notification, a Best Buy Black Friday deal, unbeatable. Online shopping has stolen its thunder but you’ll hit the Outlets early tomorrow, just in case. In the afternoon you’ll come home and put up the tree because that needs to get done this weekend and your kids won’t stop asking about it. But tonight—your eyes glassy and your stomach filled—you’ll sleep soundly, contentedly, thankful for the free market and thankful for food. The dress rehearsal is over. Christmas season has begun.