“Christmas is a rotten hype & all we can do is ride it out.”
-Hunter S. Thompson, in a letter to journalist Hughes Rudd
I couldn’t stand to do much this year. For the holidays, I mean. The phrase “a rotten hype” would have been accurate for all of 2025 and most of the millennium if you asked me. Holidays are supposed to feel relaxing and/or energizing and cheery, but I have felt more glee on an average Tuesday at 3 pm than on an average Hannukah or Christmas. I suppose this says something good about having created a life I don’t feel the need to “holiday” from, but it’s harder to explain to people who cling blindly to Christmas and Thanksgiving and never once stop to evaluate why we celebrate them or what celebration even means.
See, I am not a curmudgeon. I don’t think it’s cool to hate on life or humanity, I’m not hostile to holly, and I like it when people finally feel a measure of connection to one another. But this year the thought couldn’t escape me: “Why are we doing this?” I mean. What does it all mean? I’m a grown-up woman and can spend money on myself or others literally any day of the year. I’m not religious and there’s no reason to sing carols about Jesus. Spending hundreds of dollars on travel just to spend a few days in a quasi-manic, stressed-out, exhausted state around high-strung family sounded awful and completely beyond any fair measure of emotional capacity.
About the best I could get was a feeling of happiness about being able to spend as much time doing nothing as I could stand. Oh yes! That is what felt like a festive season to me. It’s winter. It’s dark a lot. And our democracy or lack thereof is being exposed for what it is. Plus, yours truly worked hard on multiple degrees and didn’t come up for air until December 17th.
But it isn’t just about having anxious relatives or being busy. The truth for lots of us is that the old truths no longer feel true. We are all scrambling, in a sense, to decide what we believe in now. This is a worthy process, but it doesn’t do much to preserve tradition. And when tradition doesn’t serve us – or when it actively starts to destroy us – that’s when it needs to go. I believe this is what Hunter S. was on about in some capacity when he called Christmas a rotten hype.
We have a $7.25/hour minimum wage here in Kentucky. That means your apartment can’t cost more than $386 per month on the outside and we all know that isn’t a price that exists. Healthcare is skyrocketing. We can’t pay rent, buy food, afford medical care, and the school loan system is in shambles for higher education and riddled with bullet holes in standard education. Regular people are getting napped off the streets, children are being trafficked, and the man in charge of the nation is part of it all. When we pray each day that kids won’t get shot, a consumer holiday feels hollow. I don’t want a day or two “break” from life via an expensive, outdated holiday, I want to live a life I believe in every day. I’ll take that over a yearly gift. I’ll take feeling alive on Tuesday at 3 pm.
This year, my gift came while watching a quiet film on Christmas Day with my partner. I was falling asleep because I felt safe and my nervous system finally felt a deep sense of calm, and it was the best present. It is from stability like that from which many good things come. That peace lasted 45 minutes until my family video-called, anxious and forced. Their ideas of fun will never be mine.
But there was one peaceful moment: I got to see my only nephew over that video call, and that was just terrific, him standing there. I don’t like watching kids coached into performing: how to unwrap gifts, what to say upon opening, etc. So this year, I just enjoyed his sweet, shy face as he stood there in Christmas PJ’s. He was deciding how to act and respond to the auntie from states away who he barely sees in person. No pushing, no suggestions. Just a kid being a kid. In that moment, I tried to recall instances of purity from my own childhood, and fell short. Somehow, I could think of so many instances of people pleasing but not one authentic reaction. No wonder every holiday has felt pale.
Those were my gifts of the year 2025. Five minutes with a healthily functioning nervous system and a moment’s snapshot of a smiling, five year old child.
In this economy, those are pure and sunlit gold.