In his 2012 review of Sufjan Stevens’ Silver & Gold boxset, Pitchfork writer Ryan Dombal describes the project as “an excavation into Sufjan’s conflicted Christmas heart.” Dombal contends this excavation, which grapples with the spiritual, sentimental, and beautiful aspects of Christmastime as well as its consumeristic, painful, and ugly elements is exactly what we need. He remarks, “Of course, Sufjan's uniquely bizarre feelings toward all things merry is a boon for the rest of us, who naturally have the same kind of anxieties and phobias about the holidays, but lack the vast musical talent and/or OCD graphic design skills to make it really count.”

It was only as I sat down to write this essay, having spent countless hours preparing/procrastinating by listening to and reading about Sufjan’s Christmas music, did I recognize what a “boon” these albums (and their accompanying “frills and flourishes”) truly are. Because it’s not just Sufjan’s musical talent or artistic skills that make these albums so impressive and moving: it’s that thinking, writing, and talking about Christmas is hard. I would argue that this is true even if you grew up with and continue to maintain a Norman Rockwell, picture-perfect, idyllic Christmas. Rummaging through Christmas memories and trying to find and write a cohesive narrative is difficult. It IS an excavation. An archeological one, where you spend hours/months/years examining the same area, discovering fragmented pieces of the past, and putting together the story of those fragments in the present, inevitably told through the lens of your own bias. This isn’t just the task set before me as I write this essay, this is the task we all contend with every year at Christmastime.

Each year as we prepare for the holidays, we excavate our memories and make choices about how we want to keep Christmas (*Extremely Fred Scrooge voice* “But, uncle, you don’t KEEP it!”). For some, it’s abstaining altogether, for others it’s sticking strictly to tradition, and then there are those in the middle who are starting new traditions and amending old ones. All of these are different ways we try to cultivate a “merry” Christmas.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes Christmas is not merry. Sometimes it’s just a miserable year, and even the pageantry of Christmas can’t bring us out of our misery. In fact, sometimes that pageantry makes us even more miserable because it feels like everyone else can somehow tap into this sense of joy and peace and good-will-towards-men that we cannot. And why can’t we? What are we doing wrong that everyone else is doing right? Everything? Oh. Okay.

But other times, miserable year or not, celebrating Christmas can buoy us. We find comfort in its consistencies, both the sacred and profane, even if we’re not particularly attached to the religious or commercial elements of Christmas. We appreciate the cold and the warmth, the strings of lights contrasting the lengthy nights, the giving and receiving, and the festive airs we put on to separate this season from other times.

Most years, Christmas probably involves a mix of miserable and merry elements, while some Christmases throughout our lives will fall on the extremes of the spectrum, which brings us to the man at the center of this essay: Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan’s Christmas albums embrace this spectrum, while still overarchingly celebrating Christmas in all its messy glory. On these albums, Stevens examines all the different ways we experience Christmas: he pokes fun at the ridiculous Christmas characters, he sings earnestly about both pain and love, and he covers familiar Christmas songs in his own unique way. If there’s a Christmas feeling, there’s a Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas song for it.

“We Wish You a Merry Christmas” is not one of Sufjan Stevens’ original Christmas songs. It’s a traditional English Christmas carol that harkens back to a time when Christmas carolers received treats in exchange for their door-to-door singing. The song appears on Stevens’ EP, I Am Santa’s Helper, the seventh volume of his Christmas EPs and second in the Silver & Gold box set. In reviews of this boxset, reviewers have commented on the odd and fragmented musical styles of this EP, noting that it includes “goofball jamming” and doesn’t seem as put together as Sufjan’s previous or subsequent Christmas EPs. Despite those critiques, there’s something endearingly familiar about Sufjan Stevens’ rendition of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” The track is a group number, most likely performed by Sufjan Stevens and members of Danielson who are given vocal credits on the album, but it also sounds like it could be an even larger group of Stevens’ friends and family. “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” probably falls under what the reviewers called, “goofball jamming.” Musically, the song is warped and cacophonous, while still maintaining the cheery familiarity of the original tune. It’s weird and imperfect, and I love it. There’s no polished vocal arrangement, just a group of friends joyfully and rambunctiously singing an old but well-loved Christmas carol.

This version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” reminds me of Christmas Eve at my Auntie Ria’s house. Every year we gather there on Christmas Eve to celebrate Wigilia, a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner. Like with all traditions, there are elements of this evening that are fixed and others that have shifted as time has gone on. Recipes have been tweaked, family members have passed on, kids have grown up, things have changed. But over the years, the basic format has stayed the same: the Wigilia meal, the sharing of the Oplatek (a wafer that is broken into pieces for each family member as the other family members bestow specific wishes for the person in the new year), and the singing of Christmas carols over dessert. When I was younger, singing the Christmas carols was really fun. Primarily because I knew all the songs from singing in the Christmas choir and also because when you’re younger, you truly believe the novelty of inserting “Batman smells, Robin laid an egg” into Jingle Bells will never wear off. However, in my adult years, the caroling part of the night has sorta lost its luster; all the kids are grown, so no one needs to fake enthusiasm, especially for singing, for the benefit of the kids. Not to mention, the last few Christmas’s have been kind of rough for my family and as such, there hasn’t exactly been the outpouring of glee that typically accompanies Christmas caroling. Still, each year we’ve managed to eke out at least a couple songs, one of them being “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Our version is almost exactly like the Sufjan version: loud, happy voices mangled together, belonging to people who only know about one verse worth of the song. The Sufjan Stevens cover of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” may not be very beautiful, but it’s still joyful and to me, that gives it a certain truth.

Ultimately, Sufjan’s Christmas albums remind me that you can acknowledge that Christmas is a complicated, difficult, blustery, overwhelming time of year and… love it anyway. As we excavate our conflicted Christmas hearts, we can still find comfort and joy in Christmas through family, or religion, or simply, our traditions, old and new. There’s a Sufjan Christmas song for every Christmas feeling, and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” is one of my favorites: sitting in the warm, crowded dining room of my aunt’s house, full on pierogis, shout-singing about figgy pudding with my family.