Traditions
Sometimes we get caught up in ritual, thinking something we do one year for the holidays has to happen every year. There are religious celebrations and cultural events I don’t take part in but respect tremendously. There are also those little things that certain families participate in that were never present in my life. Nowadays, kids do the Elf on the Shelf thing, but that wasn’t something I participated in as a child (although I did buy my own Elf on the Shelf as an adult and put a cozy robe on him before taking pics of him in compromising positions for laughs).
One of my favorite traditions is with one of my best friends, Jill. We like to forgo gifts and instead spend the money going to cheap photo studios and taking dramatic professional pics with a confused photographer. The studios are usually set up for children, so we’re often posing with absurd backdrops and insane props. We spend the whole time laughing. Here are some of my faves…
Here we are dramatically wrapped in a giant rosary. It’s amazing I didn’t burst into flames on the spot.
She was framed! For some reason they had an empty picture frame as a prop. Unclear why.
The photographer for this setup was incredibly confused.
Unfortunately, the publisher would not let me use this as the book cover.
I went through a “googly eye era” after purchasing these giant googly eyes. You can put them on everything to make it funny. Vaccuum cleaners, refrigerators, or your bestie.
This last one is a picture of us opening the gift of Magic Mike on Blu-ray, an item more valuable than gold, frankincense, or myrrh.
I get especially obsessed with pop culture customs and the way certain pieces of art are annually celebrated. As a talk show junkie, I need to see Darlene Love on the boob tube every December. She’s a queen who has performed “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” year after year on Letterman and later revived it for The View when Dave was off the air. As much as I worship Darlene, I always imagine that if I had my own talk show, I’d invite Willa Ford on to sing her take on “Santa Baby” that appeared on an early 2000s CD called MTV: A TRL Christmas. I’ve had the same truck since 2006, a vehicle with a six-disc changer, one loaded with the TRL album, Mariah, Kelly, Jessica, and both Rosie O’Donnell Christmas albums come November. If I’m being honest, most of those are in there year-round.
TV networks are always programming old classics like A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I’ve been terrified of those Claymation specials ever since I was a kid—something about the noise his nose makes leaves me uneasy—but it’s impossible to miss it because it airs every year. A Christmas Story usually gets twenty-four-hour coverage on TBS. They filmed it near my hometown, and the owners offer yearly tours of the house so people can put on a pink bunny suit and walk around inside.
I like to read, so Skipping Christmas by John Grisham (which was later made into the film Christmas with the Kranks, a bonkers Tim Allen/Jamie Lee Curtis movie that is both five stars and also just one star) is read by the fire each December. A lot of parents read The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg to their kids during the holidays, and it’s such a beautiful book that I often find myself lost in the pages when I see it at my nieces and nephews’ houses. It was also made into a feature film using complex animation that wasn’t quite ready to be used on humans. Here’s a still frame from the movie…
Just kidding. That’s actually a drawing my four-year-old nephew Brady drew for me, but it’s more appealing to me than the creepy way they animated The Polar Express, even with the balls Brady inexplicably drew on the snowman. I’ve always been disappointed that there aren’t more Christmas books for adults to enjoy yearly, which is why you’re all getting this one. My dream is that people will pull The Jolliest Bunch out with their decorations and escape into the pages when the snow starts to fall. I hope these words will start to feel familiar and each chapter will feel like a warm blanket on a cold night.
One of the traditions I hold most dear is that of Oprah’s Favorite Things list. This started as a special episode of her daytime talk show, and I remember rushing home from school, finishing my homework as quickly as possible, and then sitting down at 5:00 p.m. to watch. Oprah would gather an unsuspecting audience who thought they were there for a typical show. They’d be thrilled to hear wise words from Iyanla or watch Nate Berkus make over Jerry O’Connell’s bachelor pad, but getting to be in the audience for a Favorite Things episode? Forget it. For the youths out there who never got a chance to witness this: Please, you must do your research and immediately go find one of them online. People died!* The best was 2010 when Ms. Winfrey stood in front of the crowd wearing a black dress and started blabbering on about meditation and how important it was.
“How about we meditate on this?” Oprah said as she removed the black dress and revealed a red one underneath.
The sound of jingle bells came over the studio speakers, and fake snow rained from the ceiling.
“It’s our favorite things! Ho, ho, ho!” Oprah shouted with an intensity that can only be described as cheery sorcerer. The stage behind her transformed into Santa’s workshop, with PAs dressed as elves running around to make it look festive. The audience went absolutely wild. Comprised of 92 percent women and 8 percent gay men, the group looked like their heads would explode. There wasn’t a ton of gay representation on television back then, but I remember feeling so seen when a man in an ascot raised his hands to the air as his legs gave out at just the thought of leaving that Illinois studio with a new Sony digital camera, panini maker, and Josh Groban CD. The entire hour was bliss, and it grew every year. Back in the late ’90s, O was giving away pajamas, but by the 2000s, she had iPads and cars. One year, she did TWO(!!!) episodes of Favorite Things. Eventually, Oprah decided to retire her daily talk show, and we all cried as she said goodbye to daytime, and Kristin Chenoweth sang “For Good” at the United Center during her last week on air.
I lost sleep at night worrying about losing my Favorite Things episodes. They marched on, albeit in different form in her magazine and via Amazon.com, but it wasn’t quite the same. I still follow, of course, needing to know what type of brownie pans Oprah says I should buy, but I long for the days of a studio audience losing their shit at a flat-screen TV reveal. Is it too much to ask for the Oprah Winfrey Network to gather some essential workers and give them refrigerators and Black Eyed Peas albums on camera? Maybe by the time you’re reading this, there will have already been Oprah Favorite Things reform, and networks/streaming services will have realized that the best special they can give us during the late months is not a variety hour hosted by Miley Cyrus and Bill Murray but a reboot of these Oprah classic episodes.*
In the meantime, I thought I’d comprise a list of my favorite things for you all. These all make fabulous evergreen holiday gifts for you or someone you know.
- How Do I Un-Remember This? Unfortunately True Stories. A book by me.
- Expensive bedding. If you are an adult, you need to invest in luxury bedding. There are so many different levels, so you don’t have to completely break the bank, but you should be spending slightly more than what naturally seems appropriate for your sheets, pillows, and duvet. You’re in the bed every night, so it will all be worth it. Plus, if you’re single, a cozy bed will attract a cozy partner. It’s also imperative that a duvet cover should be filled with two duvet inserts. This is what makes it look pillowy.
- Seasonal body wash/candles. I love a peppermint shower scrub or a sweet cinnamon pumpkin pancake three-wick, and so do most people.
- Food. Specifically, I like frozen deep-dish pizzas from Chicago. If you’re from the Windy City, chances are you have your favorites…I prefer Giordano’s, but I know other people like their Lou Malnati’s. Both places, as well as many others, sell frozen versions that heat nicely and make for a delicious treat throughout the year.
Finally, I have my perennial Christmas movie faves that I absolutely must watch once a year. It’s not holiday time unless I watch A Muppet Family Christmas, a little-known Muppet special that aired in the late ’80s. I know most Muppet fans prefer The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is lovely and wildly important, but the family Christmas special is always the most important for me. I get a little nutty about my Christmas movie watching, always scheduling time for both as well as another Muppet seasonal flick, A Very Merry Muppet Christmas (this one has a fight scene between Miss Piggy and Joan Cusack, if that helps sell you on its merits), plus traditional classics like Elf, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Home Alone 1–2, Home for the Holidays, The Family Man, Miracle on 34th Street, The Real Housewives of New York Berkshires episodes, A Diva’s Christmas Carol, Just Friends, The Preacher’s Wife, select live performances from Christina Aguilera’s My Kind of Christmas album era, Meet Me in St. Louis, Ashley Tisdale’s performance of “Last Christmas” from a 2007 tree lighting, The Santa Clause 1–3, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and countless others.
My mom’s favorite movie is called The Gathering. It’s a 1976 made-for-TV Christmas film starring Ed Asner and Maureen Stapleton; most people have never even heard of it, but Linda worships it like it’s the most acclaimed feature ever made. When we were kids, she would ask, “Who wants to watch The Gathering with me?” before sliding an old VHS into the VCR and curling up on the couch for a weepy family drama about Ed Asner dying and his grown kids visiting for one last Christmas. My brothers and I would always turn down the invite, rolling our eyes at the idea of watching something from the 1970s that isn’t Rocky or The Godfather. Eventually, she replaced the VHS with a bare-bones DVD, and when we would visit home as adults with significant others and kids, Mom would ask who wanted to stay and watch her Gathering DVD. We might’ve been older, but we were still just as uninterested in sitting through it. After thirty-something years of saying no, I finally gave in during the winter holidays in 2021.
Two years of a pandemic had just gone by, including social upheaval, elections, and all the other hellish things we’d gone through around that time, so I figured how bad could viewing one movie be? I suppose I was extra emo that year after not seeing my family for the entirety of the previous holiday season due to COVID. I was sappy, and relationships were put into perspective. So many loved ones were lost, the impact of which I don’t think we’ve all ever properly dealt with, and I was just grateful to spend time with the ones I loved in the same room.
Mom and Dad popped some popcorn, I grabbed a blanket, and we started the movie. It was filmed in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, also near where I grew up, so Dad told me stories of his youth near the same waterfall we saw on-screen, and Mom shushed us at the right moments to ensure I didn’t miss any important plot points.
We often get so caught up in our own worlds that we forget how to connect. We schedule catch-up phone calls to go through our troubles or list our accomplishments without ever emotionally connecting with the person on the other end of the line. Social media has separated us even more, so we tend to link up with people like us, which can be a great thing but also prohibits us from experiencing other points of view. The algorithm shows us only the people we agree with or occasionally the people who are so vastly different from us that it turns connection into anger. Politics pushes us left or right, religion becomes an excuse to dislike someone, and media capitalizes on segregating the “other.” It might seem like everything wants to separate us, but pop culture remains the great unifier. Ask someone their favorite movie, and you might be surprised that a person who is of a different color or creed shares your fave. More than that, pop culture can help us relate to the people we love but have struggled chatting with.
After The Gathering, I asked my mom the other movies that meant something to her. She mentioned The Way We Were and Love Story, two movies from her youth I had heard about but had never seen. With everything at our fingertips, I was able to stream the movies on a lazy Sunday, then call home and talk to Mom about Hubble and Jenny. She seemed so excited telling me about her first time seeing them and her love for Barbra, and we related over the tears that resulted from the last scene of Love Story.
We attach memories to movies that move us emotionally, which is why, I think, holiday movies have even more impact than the traditional summer blockbusters. Everyone has their favorites; some prefer the slapstick of Home Alone to the romance of Love Actually. With the stress of the season, I encourage you all to take some time away from ice-skating and baking to ask your mom, dad, sibling, or friend what their favorite movie is. It doesn’t have to be a Christmas flick, but if it is, sit down and watch it together. When the end credits roll, talk about why you like it, then ask them what it was like the first time they saw it or why they love it so deeply. It’s so easy to find the things we all disagree on, but what are the things that make us feel like we’re all living this human experience together?
After The Gathering, I invited my mom to watch one of my faves, The Family Stone, another weepy family drama centered on the idea of one last Christmas. The movies are surprisingly similar—grown kids with varying personalities visit home, where they’re forced to say goodbye to their dying parent. It’s all incredibly sad, and I wonder what it is about the holidays that encourages that trope. I think it’s a reminder to the audience. We get so caught up in our worlds, and when December hits, we’re expected to spend all this quality time with the families we’ve ignored for the previous eleven months. When we finally do see each other, it’s filled with anxiety and stress. Yes, those movies are supposed to dramatically entertain us for a couple hours, but they’re also meant to show us the alternative. The Gathering and The Family Stone are glimpses into our own lives; they’re there to It’s a Wonderful Life us into appreciating what we have when we have it. Some of you reading this might’ve already said goodbye and have a missing place setting for your holiday dinner, dreading the season without your people, but if there’s someone, anyone, you have in your life whom you love now, take two hours and watch something with them on the couch. Revel in the moment together, whether you’re watching some Hallmark hijinks or a maudlin festive drama, just appreciate being next to someone, and try to bond. Because in the end, connection is all we have.