How to Not Hate Christmas

With each passing year, Christmas decorations in my neighborhood go up earlier, my December calendar is more comprehensively colonized, and my sympathy for the Grinch grows. I’ve come to see the green gentleman’s campaign as fundamentally self-defensive against the coming onslaught of tong-tinglers and foo-flounders and nondenominational holiday cheer being forced down his throat. Whatever excesses of Grinchiness he admittedly indulges in, his counterattack against the imperialism of unsolicited, noisy, garish celebration is at least understandable. Christmas started the war, not him.

Indeed, the never-ending noise of activities, advertisements, and obligatory merriment left me at the brink of buying a dog named Max and building a sleigh in my garage. Around mid-December of last year, the thought struck me with startling clarity that I kind of hate Christmas. I hate the noise, the busyness, the logistics, the culturally enforced enthusiasm, and most of all the exhausted emptiness of December 26.

But I also hated the bitterness and resentment swirling inside of me (along with the cheap eggnog). My bad attitude made my kids sad. Grinchiness and Scroogery are, sadly, even more spiritually corrosive than the 24-hour Christmas music station. This year, to save me from tears (mostly my children’s), I have decided to compose a guide entitled “How to Not Hate Christmas.” While it is aimed at yours truly, I should be pleased and grateful if you find anything beneficial here.

1. Don’t go to Christmas parties that you don’t want to go to. Say that you have a cold. If you have kids, then there is a 100% chance you actually do have a cold. Have some friends over and play foosball and pretend Christmas doesn’t exist for a while. This same principle applies to work mixers, candlelight services, any kind of Christmas production your own children aren’t in, school events, movie nights, etc. You know you’ve had a cough since November 13 anyway. Put it to good use.

2. Do go caroling. Your caroling group will not harmonize well when you’re at your ninth house and it’s eighteen degrees outside. That doesn’t matter. Older folks, sick folks, single moms, people you’d never expect to love it … really, actually do. In the meantime, you get a little glimpse of what Christmas was supposed to be, and maybe still could be.

3. Don’t waste time on the internet speculating if Mary really did know, or if St. Nicholas actually slapped Arius at Nicaea, or if Christmas is just baptized Yule. Also, quit talking about how Christmas isn’t really Jesus’ birthday, David. Literally everyone already knows that. Save what little energy and peace you still have.

4. Watch The Muppets Christmas Carol. It’s a minor miracle that this exists. Michael Caine plays Scrooge utterly straight, gloriously disdainful of the puppet-driven madness occurring all about him. But for all the meta-jokes (“It’s alright, this is culture!”) and slapstick gags, the Ghost of Christmas Future is still chilling, and the final scene still feels like the Kingdom of Heaven. Muppets is too absurd to be sentimental, too sad to be farcical, and too joyful to be ignored.

5. Generosity being the  archenemy of that cramped, Scroogey feeling, maybe consider giving just a little more than you had budgeted (if circumstances allow, of course!). Maybe make an extra donation to your favorite charity if picking gifts already feels like punishment to you. The key here is to avoid making a big deal out of it, even to yourself.

6. Do something dumb. In 1673, the Puritan minister Increase Mather condemned Christmas as an occasion for “Revellings” and “mad mirth.” In 2025, we could probably make do with a bit more Revelling. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, but try to engage in a pointless, unproductive waste of time this Christmas. Make wassail, put up an inflatable Rudolph, play tackle football in the snow (like they did in Miracle) for about twelve minutes before you feel like you’re getting hypothermia. Bake terrible cookies.

7. Don’t be sad on purpose. Christmas invites reflection on the ongoing scarcity of peace on earth and goodwill towards men. Decline the invitation. Don’t just listen to Sufjan Stevens (I mean, do listen to him, but not just him). Everyone already knows that everything is terrible. It’s Jesus’ birthday party, man. Don’t bum him out. (It goes without saying, I hope, that I’m referring to self-imposed theological sorrow, not to the real pains inflicted by life. If Christmas is genuinely sad, then let it be sad. Please don’t try to pump in some fabricated holiday cheer if you’re not feeling it).

8. Call someone. On the phone. Maybe someone you haven’t spoken to in a while; maybe someone you haven’t spoken to in a while on purpose. Just ask Kevin McCallister’s neighbor: Reconnection and reconciliation are real magic — and the reason we celebrate Jesus’ birth in the first place.

9. Remember the day of your death. Actually, this is great advice year-round. But it’s especially salient during Christmastime with all its noise, noise, noise to remember that life is short, probably shorter than we would like — and that presence with friends, with family, with joy and pain alike, and ultimately with God, is the redemption of time.

10. Read all of Luke 2. Keep going where Linus leaves off, through Jesus’ circumcision and his purification rite, Simeon and Anna, and the episode of boy Jesus at the temple that hits like comic relief. In particular: the Song of Simeon (“Nunc dimittis,” if you insist) is salvation history in miniature; Simeon declares that this child is not only salvation for Israel but also “a light to the Gentiles.”

This from a man whose beloved nation was currently overrun by Gentiles. Yet, he knows that this very Jewish messiah is somehow for everyone if he’s for anyone. It’s pointless to set bounds on God’s generosity. The entire thing is one huge, absurd divine gift to the world, to be received by those too childlike — or too tired — to refuse it.