I don't have the technical expertise to write about the material nature of this song; the harmonies, melodies, key changes, and all that. I actually hadn’t heard any other version of the song until writing this, so I’m not the expert. As covered by Sufjan Stevens, “We Need A Little Christmas” feels slightly more hoarse, more distant in a way such that it speaks to a desperation in the holiday season that perhaps everyone feels in winter. In an upbeat song the words “For I've grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older….” seem a little empty, but only in the way that all the trappings of Christmas seem a little empty.

So while I can’t get more technical on the song than that, I can say that the hoarseness, the dissonance, and the desperation that echoes around Sufjan’s version of the song is why this rendition sticks with me. So much so that even in the stifling summer air of June, July, and August, it will come to mind and serve as a reminder that winter is creeping up a little faster each day.

I think many people subconsciously create a barrier between the Christmases of childhood and adulthood. The holiday season of my memories was a distant, glittering, snow globe of pine needles, wrapping paper, and Christmas dinners. The first year I left home for college, the boundary of leaving those Christmases in the past became a solid wall of ice and sleet, and I did all I could to try reach through the cold and find the Christmas of the past. The idealization of the holiday that I tend to indulge in is also often the reason people are so split on the idea of Christmas. On the one hand, it can remind you of what you have, your family and friends, and your warm home. On the other, it can remind you that you have none of those things, or that in the next year you may lose everything that has made one Christmas bearable.

And so, my first Christmases away from home were the coldest I had ever felt. In a literal sense, the temperature dropped to unearthly digits, and also because the rest of the world was very far away.

With the wind coming down from the arctic circle and the streets coated in black ice, Christmas wasn’t about presents or even family; it was about feeling warm again. So I pursued the warmth of memory, put up pathetic little lights and huddled by the radiator in my apartment, listening to songs like this one to nurse my Christmas spirit through Thanksgiving and December. I desperately wanted Christmas to save the season for me. I didn’t look forward to it for any reason except that in my mind it had turned into a warm, red button labeled “joy” despite the biting cold and the homesickness (please, please put up the tree; my spirit is falling fast).

On Christmas day, it wasn’t the same as it always had been. I waited to try again the next year.

And so I was more proactive. I dragged friends to the Macy’s to look at the decorations. I planned gift lists and put up nicer lights. I lay in the snow until I couldn’t feel my fingers. I visited home and baked holiday-themed desserts every day leading up to Christmas and asked for little and laughed with my family. It snowed on Christmas eve, and all was back the way it was supposed to be. Perhaps I was colder, tired-er, sicker, and leaner, but it was a gorgeous Christmas, and I couldn’t be melancholy.

On Christmas day we opened presents as a family and ate freshly baked crescent rolls, and before eleven AM, my older sister cried outside in the snow and screamed at me that she hated Christmas and that she always, always had.

I guess we fall on the two different sides of the Christmas opinion spectrum. I didn’t see her at Christmas the following year, but my approach to the holiday didn’t change either. I still wanted Christmas to save me.

Does that seem cold? To be unmoved by a sibling’s anguish? Perhaps for an outsider, but every family is complicated. And every family member in the world copes with those complications in a different way. I swallow the quiet desperation and falling spirits of the year and put up tinsel and cedar boughs while listening to Christmas music with headphones because no one else wants to hear it.

No amount of dessert baked with love, or family movie time, or twinkling lights, will ever recreate my fairytale childhood Christmases. After all, they probably never existed in that glistening perfection for anyone but me. But I’d rather pantomime an empty, jolly, beautiful holiday than succumb to the cold and deflated reality of the holiday season. Perhaps I’ve latched onto songs like this one in order to cope with the complexity of the holiday season. Or maybe it’s just a fun little holiday song about celebrating light and joy in the dead of winter, and everyone needs a little bit of that.