When I was young, my Dad and my brothers and I would play a Christmas themed version of Monopoly. We played it year-round, but particularly during the holidays. In the game, there was a set of properties that were named Joy, Peace, and Goodwill. I distinctly remember my Dad buying the Peace property on several occasions, refusing to trade it, and saying, “this is the most valuable property of all.” This is a cheesy way to pass on a life lesson to your kids, but I think it’s also a very bizarre scenario that gets to the heart of humanity’s most complicated holiday.

Just think about the very prospect of a Christmas themed Monopoly game. It’s completely absurd! Christmas is supposed to be a holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, the savior of humanity who advocated against greed and amassing personal wealth. Yet here we are, playing a Christmas themed game in which the goal is to get rich by bankrupting your friends and family. To get a good picture of just how cynical this is, try to imagine a skilled Monopoly player driving my Dad into bankruptcy and forcing him to sell his Peace property, then imagine my Dad, completely out of money, landing on the Peace property and not being able to afford it. And yet, this is a fairly accurate portrait of what Christmas has become, hasn’t it? Christmas has been co-opted by large corporations and has become more of a consumerist hell rather than the reflective spiritual holiday it was supposed to be. Christmas has become completely divorced from the values that initially inspired the holiday and has become married to the loathsome capitalist values of the modern-day.

It’s not particularly insightful to point out that Christmas is currently in a bad way. But our critique of modern Christmas ought to go deeper than the right-wing battle cry of “keeping Christ in Christmas.” What we should instead recognize, is that the ruling class has discovered that a holiday about giving gifts is an opportunity to make a shit ton of money and they’ve exploited this fact to the point where everything that the holiday was intended to represent, now seems like a cliché or a cynical cash grab. The advent of Christmas Capitalism has left many feeling alienated from a set of ideas and beliefs that should be central to our common humanity. Ideas like peace on earth and goodwill towards men, should be truisms, and yet, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth if I say these phrases aloud. Songs about spending time with family and being kind to a neighbor shouldn’t agitate the ears so much, as these are things that all people long for.

The current predicament of Christmas would disturb the late David Foster Wallace, who often wrote about the relationship between art and our feelings. He wrote the following:

“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

One can’t help but feel like David Foster Wallace was talking explicitly about Christmas. When Christmas carols that express good human sentiments, are played ad nauseam in every Walmart across America, the effect is that we no longer regard those sentiments as being serious. We begin to confuse a genuine desire for peace on earth and goodwill towards men with the cynical manipulation of these sentiments for profit, and the result is that we stop longing for such things or worse, we are repulsed by them. This sounds eerily similar to the picture I painted earlier of my bankrupted Dad having to sell his Peace property.

So, what wisdom can Sufjan Stevens offer us? Can he help us defeat Christmas Capitalism? While many know him for his sad songs, anyone who follows Sufjan’s blog knows he is a profound optimist. Constantly reminding us all to “take two Aleve® and keep it moving!” and marveling at how “abundant” the world is. So perhaps, in his optimism, he can turn this cynical holiday on its head in some way and reclaim all those good sentiments, like Peace, Joy, and Goodwill, that die a little bit every time they’re sung disingenuously in a song. I believe this is what he’s trying to do with his 100+ Christmas songs. Sufjan seems to think that Christmas can be rescued from its current form, and clearly, he thinks that Christmas is worth saving.

Across his 100+ Christmas songs, Sufjan represents a fulfillment of David Foster Wallace’s warning about “ads pretending to be art.” His Christmas songs are equal parts original songs and covers of the old classics. But when Sufjan sings these songs, they hardly sound like the glorified commercials that typically play on TV and in shopping malls around the holidays. The difference is there isn’t one iota of disingenuity in Sufjan’s voice, even when he’s singing songs that have been sung a million times.

This is most clear on “Happy Family Christmas.” “Happy Family Christmas,” despite it being an original, is the song where Sufjan comes closest to cliché. With a runtime of just 82 seconds, the song’s lyrics could fit on a mass-marketed Christmas card. They’re so short, it’s worth copying them in full right here: “Just this once for Christmas/ I want us all to be/ Like one great big happy/ Family/ Family.” Coming from anyone else, this might be an ad disguised as art. But when we hear Sufjan sing this himself, it’s apparent that this is not mass-marketed corporate pop, this is Sufjan. In his voice, we can hear a genuine yearning for peace and community, and a genuine hope that such a thing is a possibility. Sufjan’s not making a cash grab like every pop star that covers “Silent Night,” he’s simply expressing a genuine feeling, and he seems blissfully indifferent or unaware of the fact that such a feeling is being sold for a tremendous profit by people that would make Ebenezer Scrooge look charitable.

But the nugget of wisdom, found in “Happy Family Christmas” that can help us defeat Christmas Capitalism, is not found in the lyrics, nor is it necessarily found in Sufjan’s genuine expression of what would otherwise be a cheap tagline. Instead, it’s found in the instrumentation. The first half of the song is light and pretty, primarily featuring piano and acoustic guitar. Once Sufjan gets through the lyrics, the song erupts into a noisy guitar solo. And on top of that noisy guitar work, we can just barely hear Sufjan singing “Bam, bam, bam…” over and over almost as if it’s an a cappella guitar solo. The song is no masterpiece, it’s clumsy and even a little childish. But “Happy Family Christmas” doesn’t succeed despite these flaws, it succeeds because of them. “Happy Family Christmas” is not awe-inspiring, but it is fun, and it’s fun because Sufjan unapologetically embraces his quirks. “Happy Family Christmas” is undignified, unfiltered joy funneled into a song, and this is why it defeats the cynicism that plagues modern Christmas.

The song demonstrates that authenticity can only exist in absence of dignity. In other words, authenticity is what we are when we aren’t trying to make a commodity of ourselves. When we hear the song “Happy Family Christmas,” it’s clearly genuine because no sane person would create a song so clumsy and childish unless it was from the heart. There’s no market for such a thing. This is the cure for Christmas Capitalism, it’s to stop selling ourselves and to start living authentically.

The cure to Christmas Capitalism is to become completely authentic. Embrace our flaws and our humanity so that we are no longer a commodity to be bought and sold, but instead, we are just people. Childish, messy, chaotic, and foolish in the way that only human beings are able to be. Instead of selling ourselves in a real-life version of Christmas Monopoly, we learn to dance and sing and laugh with one another. We learn to value community over cheap toys and gifts. By becoming our authentic selves, we no longer need to buy incessantly. We no longer need cheap toys or a surplus of clothes that we will never wear and things we will never use, because these things no longer define us.

Believe it or not, Christmas used to be this way. Way back in the 5th century, when Christmas was still called The Feast of the Nativity, Christians would go to church in the morning and afterward, spend the day getting drunk. They’d sing and dance and make fools of themselves (they often fought and caused trouble too, but hey, that’s what humans do!). In those days, there wasn’t a Hess truck to look forward to each year. But there was community, and there was joy (and copious amounts of alcohol), and that seemed to be enough for most people.

This may sound like a cliché, but that’s okay. It’s okay to embrace clichés. In fact, if we don’t embrace clichés like community and joy and peace, then we lose those values to the profiteers that corrupted Christmas in this way. If we choose to play Christmas Monopoly, we will probably have to sell peace to some monopolist, or worse, we will become the kind of cynical monopolist that profits off of peace. So instead of playing, we should listen to Sufjan Stevens and sing and dance with one another as though we are one great, big family.