Santa's Sad Sack: Holiday joy is fickle as hell
Yule be happy to learn that the holidays are either very cool or patently shit but never in between
Do the winter holidays bum you out? Do you just want to light every tree, Christmas or otherwise, on fire as soon as the clock strikes December 1? Have you ever heard - and maybe even repeated - the statistic that December sees the highest rates of suicides and murders and baby torturings and ritualistic sacrifice of kittens? Or something?
Or maybe you’re one of those people who loves an ugly sweater, can correctly identify mistletoe (in some cultures these people are called “liars”), and who delights in picking out small plastic objects which will, God willing, some day collect the absolute best and most special layer of dust the world has ever seen. Maybe you looooooove the holidays.
Either way, according to decades of editorials, research papers, and oh-shit-we-still-have-to-put-out-a-paper headlines, you’re in good company. Because a majority of people feel the same way that you do, even though that is statically impossible!
The holiday season has, depending on the year and the broader social and cultural context, been alternatively categorized as either a time of delirious magic or spectacular malaise. It’s either the time of year when everyone takes a flying leap or shows up at their friend’s house to clumsily woo his wife, with whom they have never actually spoken.
There is no in-between. You cannot, according to both research and reporting, have a neutral, lukewarm feeling about Christmas.
Uncle Sam sez: Cheer is patriotic!
Let’s first reach back to the faraway days of Normal Rockwell. You know, the time before everyone could vote or have their own checking account or expect to use the same doors as one another. The time that people in red hats (not the Santa kind) want to go back to because everything was “great.”
And like, I guess it was great? For some people? Because all of the soldiers sadly whistling “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” finally were home. It’s the 1950s! The war is over (don’t worry, another one is coming)! We’re buying big ol’ American-made cars and eating enormous turkeys cooked in ovens bought on credit!
At this time, Christmas was truly the ~ most wonderful season of all ~ for the most middle-class people of all. Folks who had more purchasing power than they had in years, who had been fully enveloped in the idea of Santa as a character, and who had high enough ceilings to bring a real-ass tree into the house for a few weeks and treat it like a crinkly pet.
Not so much for everyone else, but we’re discussing the dominant paradigm here.
American-made toys, appliances, and vehicles were the gifts of the day. The United States had defeated fascism (forever! Right? RIGHT??) and now was the time to celebrate by buying shit. Coupled with the expansions of shopping malls, car culture, and the joy of showing off how much better you and your family were than everyone else, it was a time when Christmas would be merry and bright OR. ELSE.
This, predictably, did not last. And it was partially put to bed by one huge, giant, Santa’s suit-sized rumor that is untraceable but holy wow it’s enduring.
Holly jolly jumpers? Not so fast.
If you’ve heard the “statistic” about the holiday seasons and the exceptional increase in suicides, congrats! You heard an untrue thing. Maybe you’ve even repeated it because, well, it sounds true, right? Don’t poorly-strung lights on million-dollar homes just make you sad? Just me? Ugh ok then.
Anyway, this rumor has been floating around for ages. I tried to find the source and couldn’t narrow it down to a single study or idea. What I do know, though, is that this idea got a lot of ink when everyone got bummed again because, like, war and assassinations and generally awful news.
Scientific American traces the believability of this idea it back to “broken promise” myth, or the idea that the aftermath of a holiday is harder than the lead-up because it’s inevitably going to be disappointing. Plenty of people find January to be pretty rough, so they’re primed to believe that it’s a serious problem. The media also doesn’t help; research from the from the Annenberg School for Communication found that of news coverage on the subject of the “Christmas blues,” the majority repeated this “statistic,” even without evidence.
For the record, though, there really isn’t any correlation between Christmastime and suicides. There just are not data to show that more people act on suicidal ideation at the holiday season.
Though, to be very clear, that’s of data that are available. Which actually isn’t saying *that* much because it’s kind of hard to research how many people had too many egg nogs and drove their Plymouth into a tree “on accident.”
There are also data to show that a LOT OF PEOPLE REALLY DO GET SAD AROUND DECEMBER. Folks who are grieving are reminded of the people they’ve lost. Those who have been barely holding it together financially all year are suddenly expected to spend out of their budget for travel or gifts. And service workers have to schlep to work so they can pour coffee for divorced dads at IHOP. It’s a time that can really remind you of all the shit you’ve been dealing with all year and suppressing into oblivion.
NAMI reports that 64% of people with mental illness report holidays make their conditions worse. Not terminally worse, mind you, but worse.
It’s possible that the misinformation around holiday suicides came from an especially depressing time in our collective history - the 1960s and 70s. In a New York Times article from 1976, one writer concluded that the people who had come of age in the previous decade were more depressed because there was just more to be depressed out, especially by contrast the hope and optimism they’d felt.
…according to dozens of specialists who counsel young people, interviewed in 14 cities across the country. large numbers of the men and women who grew up in the 60's are now experiencing a generational malaise of haunting frustrations, anxiety and depression.
The malaise, they say, is reflected in an increase in the number of people in their late 20's and early 30's receiving psychiatric help: by a rise in suicides and alcoholism in this age group, and a boom in the popularity of certain charismatic religious movements, astrology, and pop psychology cults that reflect part of thic generation's search for contentment.
The reasons cited for its problems range from disillusionment following the Watergate scandals, to disorientation caused by new sexual freedom, to the failure of life to fulfill the expectations established for themselves and society during the idealistic 60's.
I have precisely no solid evidence to indicate this, but if I had to guess when the Christmas suicide rumor started, I’d probably point somewhere around there.
You better not pout I MEAN IT. NO POUTING, YOU BIG DRIP.
Mental health professionals have been trying to debunk the suicide myth for about a decade now, but before that, there was also a collective push against the very idea of December being a stone-cold bummer. The messaging around Christmas at this time had become darker than a Seattle night in late December — it’s a sad time of year! If you’re not sad, you really should be — and some reporters and scientists were very ready to turn that frown upside-down!
The coverage of all the worst parts about Christmas — long lines, family drama, alcohol-soaked fights with coworkers, the abject sorrow that comes from being a human person in a northern-hemisphere winter, alleged suicides — had begun to take over. It was a response to the commercial excesses of a strong (and then less-strong) economy, as well as a kind of fear response to the idea that it might not, in fact, be a Wonderful Life.
Consider movies like “Scrooged,” “Trading Places,” and every “Christmas Vacation,” where the big family win is that Clark gets a bigger-than-average bonus check ensuring he’s liquid (lol) enough to put in a pool and seduce Mary of the High-Cut Undies. So many movies from the 1980s focused on ideas of commercialism and the rush and stress of the holidays. How much the Average Person would do to bring ~ Christmas Magic ~ to their families was a yardstick of their overall goodness; if a person would not contort themselves into an emotional pretzel to give the kiddies a gleeful morning full of shredded paper and “batteries not included” while Dad perches a prehistoric VHS recorder on his besweatered shoulder until his arm loses feeling.
Naturally, of course, the pendulum then swung the other way. To combat the crybabies who couldn’t handle a little joy and light, some publications took up arms in the race for good cheer.
One paper published in 1982 was lifted up the following year by a New York Times article that read as though it had been written by the tinsel-and-dry-cookies lobby. Like, here’s the conclusion of the piece:
Whatever stress Christmas brings is not necessarily bad; it may even result in greater psychological strength. ''I'm afraid we assume that just because something is stressful it is bad,'' says Dr. Wright, the California psychologist. ''The fact of the matter is, if we never experienced anything that was bad or a problem, if we never faced anything that challenged us or caused us to look inside ourselves, we would probably be vegetables.''
LOL OK, DOC. But also…chronic stress (or annual stress) is objectively damaging to one’s health. And the originally-cited paper, “Christmas Depression,” which was published in the Journal of American Medicine, didn’t *exactly* say that actually, Christmas is lit and if you’re sad it’s because you’re a stupid idiot whiny diaper-baby. Instead, it compared the amount of press that the Baby Jesus Blues were getting to the medical research available.
“No measure of psychopathology in general, or of depression in particular, has ever shown a consistent increase before Christmas,” wrote the authors. “The implication [of media reporting]…is that Christmas may very well be a public health hazard. Statistical studies have never supported this conclusion.”
But that’s not exactly the same thing as “no one is sad around the holidays.” It’s just over-hyped, the researchers concluded. And that kind of reporting — which was wall-to-wall in the 1980s and 90s — was really just a way for pre-internet newspapers and TV programs to get eyeballs and move units by being contrarian. Oh, you’re happy at Christmas? Other people aren’t! Maybe you aren’t either! It’s so commercial! Doesn’t it just make you want to die?!
You can see why everyone was so absolutely tickled when Prozac hit their doctor’s office a few years later.
So where are we now? It kind of depends on what corner of the internet you live in, but considering one of the top content types from this holiday season is faceless white influencers buying every butt-plug-looking-thing in the Target dollar section, I’d say we’re currently in a December = Good period.
But I have this theory, mostly based on how elaborately my neighbors decorate their homes (i.e. a very sophisticated research technique that definitely adheres to the scientific method), that the worse things are at home, the more excited people get about the holidays. Like, during the pandemic, where Home was all any of us had and the rest of the world was scary and we were all sad and weird, the lights were bigger and brighter and more absurd than ever before. Now, as we slither away from those dark times, I find that people aren’t getting as festive.
That doesn’t mean things aren’t dark — they are and, by the way, liberate Palestine and ceasefire now — but for most people as they go about their days in the United States, life looks relatively normal. Inflation is down some, gas is generally within reason, and the streets are about as we remember them from pre-pandemic. Which also means (I suspect) in the next few years, we’ll see a return to the mantra of Christmas Is A Bummer, It’s So Commercial, and Everyone Is Charlie Brown All The Time.
But maybe not. Maybe we’ll all keep putting the soothing balm of consumerism on our gaping, untreated wounds until we have no credit left to speak of.
Either way, be well! It’s a hard time of year (OR IS IT????) and if you do nothing else this week, try to give yourself some kind of small gift. You deserve it.
xoxo HBO