My wife is a foreigner—an immigrant from Korea who came to the United States for her master’s degree, married a local, and decided to stay.  And so, like Gulliver, who travels to distant lands where people are freaky–too short or too tall–she often finds the habits of our Great Country a little bit eccentric.

This makes me, by default, her cultural interpreter—her tour guide:  the one chosen to explain the strange ways of the North American hominoid.  Far from being a hassle, it actually is an education.  You see, cultural insiders often take a million things for granted—things like a liberal exchange policy at any store you shop at (never in Korea where you will be screamed at), or unlimited napkins at the fast food joint (you only get one), or walking in the house with your shoes on (the most sinful defilement).

Topping the list is the fact that she doesn’t get my taste for campy Christmas movies:  those movies like A Christmas Story or Trading Places that I watch every year.  “Those people are so ugly,” she tells me.  “I don’t like to look at them.”

“Baby, that’s exactly what is so appealing about the anti-Christmas story—the thing that cuts against expectation.”  But how do you explain that to a cultural outsider?  Well, you actually have to dig deep into yourself and ask some hard questions and first explain it to yourself.

You see, Christmas—the commercial Christmas–was an invention of the Victorian period.  It is that period of mass-production, of industrialism when all sorts of nice stuff from cheap gifts to cheap furniture, became the norm.  It is the period of capitalism reaching full stride.

But it was also a period of severe fragmentation—of disruption, of unrest—the time when folks were swept from the countryside into the cities; a time when things fall apart and the center does not hold; so the memory of an idealized ritual—a readymade thing called CHRISTMAS–was necessary to make a nation always on the verge of crisis, come together like a quivering pudding fresh out of the oven.

Before the modern CHRISTMAS, people wrote actual letters.  After CHRISTMAS, they bought mass-produced prints by Currier and Ives–beautiful prints of the Christmas life that they could never really have.  And these became the template for poor people to entertain upper-middle class fantasies of domestic perfectness that everybody could attain for a dime.  Remember that line from that old Christmas sleighbell song:

“It’ll be nearly like a picture print by Currier and Ives

These wonderful things are the things we’ll remember all through our lives.”

Notice the word “nearly”?  The approximation of an approximation of an approximation? This kind of imagery formed the template for the avalanche of crap that would follow…the Norman-Rockwell-Miracle-on-49^th-Street atrocities.

Reproduction of a Currier and Ives Stamp

The anti-Christmas movies are about our failings to match up to that vision—our entrapment within a world dedicated to making us good workers.  Yes, there is A Christmas Story and Trading Places but they are only off-shoots of a mightier branch:  You have darker masterpieces like David Sedaris’s amazing Holidays on Ice (where he plays an elf at a mall) or Augusten Burroughs’s even darker You Better Not Cry (where the autobiographical author has a one night stand with Santa).

Trading Places

So here is the task:  take a holiday—any holiday—and turn its expectations on its head.  Import a gothic element—a note of ugliness that befuddles the arrangement of tinsel.  Get nasty and imagine how you could really shock and perplex and befuddle your relatives on this sacred cow holiday.  I swear:  the writing will take care of itself, because if there’s one thing we love that makes us all True Blue Americans:  we love to hate holidays.