Holidays bring people together, and that’s fun
Last year, I gave my husband and my ex-boyfriend the same Christmas present, because I’m fun. They both did undergrads in chemistry, so why wouldn’t I pick up two pairs of men’s socks decorated wildly with beakers and formulas.
They hadn’t met before, so I thought the socks would be a shared talisman of having put up with me, and hopefully a reference point in future hangs.
It worked, I think, but it also might have been the beer.
Either way, I loved seeing them together, my first love (now a close friend), and my last, brought together
by the holidays and novelty socks.
As a connector and collector of people, I especially love the holidays. Socially, everything is packed into the short, dark, busy, freezing weeks before that ill-defined and lazy stretch between the 23rd-ish and the early new year.
People, too, are packed together: Colleagues from the divisions of the office that can usually get away with ignoring each other will suddenly experience themselves as a group, glitter-lit and a few drinks in, with karaoke plans and brand- new nicknames. The heavy, swaying branches of extended and blended family trees crash in the night (and sometimes fall over). Your brother’s inlaws meet your obligation friends in the elevator; your first-grade teacher is in line behind you. You meet your new love’s parents; you fight with your sister; you propose.
The main thing about the holidays, at least in a secularized, plasticized, mall-Santa context, is that they bring people together who usually aren’t together, for reasons of physical distance or demographic difference or professional pursuits or political affiliation.
The compression of the season, in space and time and meaning, means that the “other people” of it all, in the hothouse of the festive season, kicks up every possible emotion, all of it aided by sugar and cocktails.
A few years ago in Vanity Fair, Sloane Crosley wrote, “There’s something about winter holidays that invite the double-purpose-instruction genre. Open any glossy magazine in the past few decades and you’ll find these pretend prescriptive stories appearing again and again around this time of year. How to Decorate a Christmas Tree is really about drinking to get through the holidays. Learning How to Ice-Skate is really about surviving a divorce.” It’s the people.
Further evidence: the rich cache of Netflix and Hallmark Christmas movies that everyone knows are terrible, but watches over and over anyway, while not possibly wondering what the third act of The Secret Prince Who Gave Me His Scarf could reveal.
Even the recent-ish entries in the re-re-rewatched Hollywood holiday-movie canon, like Elf and Love, Actually, speak to a desire for the holidays, despite everything, to provide an annual stage for unlikely friendships, found families, work crushes, reconnection, vulnerability, spontaneous expressions of love and care, and in the case of Love, Actually, horny sentimentality. We all need each other, in all our forms, so much, and need the holidays to put it all out on the table. Twitter: @KateCarraway