Last night, my sister called me to ask what we did for Christmas as kids. We both had recollections of trees and presents when we were very little, but then our memories petered out. This was fine with us, but she lives in a world now that takes Christmas very seriously, and it seems like she always feels a bit out of step with the energy and traditions of her friends.
I don’t have many traditions myself these days. As I’ve mentioned before, I used to spend a lot of my holidays working as a dog walker, and in later years I’ve mostly happily spent them by myself. I’ve never felt the social pressure my sister does to make the holiday special, especially since she has kids. But I’m fascinated by people who have strong opinions on the holiday and how it should be spent, who can have a “good” or “bad” holiday based on whether they live up to some standards I’ve never been obligated to. What I’ve always liked best about this time of year is the sense of timelessness I move through as someone without the demands of family or tradition, swimming through these weeks when everyone is distracted and so no one wants or expects anything of me, where I can follow my own moods and make or cancel plans and everyone just chalks my inconsistency up to the chaos of the holidays.
For a while, that unobserved space was just an excuse to get drunk; I’ve spent more Christmases than I’d care to admit perched on a solitary bar stool. At the time I thought this was a romantic subversion of the idea that being alone at a bar on Christmas is a sad-sack sign of rock bottom; now that I’m sober I can see that it was in fact kinda sad, even if it didn’t feel sad at the time. So now I do other stuff with my time: I’ll often cook something ambitious. Sometimes I’ll watch every Christmas episode of Bob’s Burgers (a good tradition that you should also take up) while eating that food. This year I’m seeing some friends before going to visit my family.
There’s a lot of pressure to be happy on Christmas, or a certain different weight to any sadness you might feel compared to all the other days of the year. But I think there can also be something lovely about an off-kilter Christmas, a gently sad or maybe introspective or unremarkable one, or maybe one where you just have your normal feelings but they feel abnormal when compared to what you’re “supposed” to feel. What I was trying to capture with those drunk holidays, and what I now actually get to capture with my sober ones, is the reminder that there is no one way to live, no groove that everyone wears through life. I love how the day can be all bright lights and matching sweaters for some people, and for others it can be Chinese food and a movie, and for others it can be just a normal day, and for people like me it can be a day to think about how my days are spent and if I want to keep spending them that way.
Which brings me to the actual inspiration for this blog, which is to tell you about my friend Niko Stratis’ blog, whom I dared on Bluesky to rank how all the covers of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” try to avoid singing some of the slurs in the 1987 song that aren’t appropriate today. Niko writes,
[“Fairytale of New York” is] a song of contrasts; this band as a collective gathering of rough hewn troubadours of heartache and drink, Shane MacGowan sees and sings to the dark corners of the barroom that many would rather avert their gaze [to] and this is an important piece in the puzzle that builds the tremendous vision of beauty that is “Fairytale of New York”. These two people at the centre, Irish Immigrants in a jail cell who once felt so much hope and promise now embittered by time and circumstance.
“Fairytale of New York” has become a kind of de facto Christmas classic, but it’s not one that you’d have soft-edged memories of singing around the piano. Niko dug through all the weird “haggard”s and “blagger”s and “maggot”s that replace the song’s most jarring slur, and while they gave me a laugh they also made me think about the the combination of beauty and pain that make the song so affecting, and make it feel so right for the complicated feelings of this season. It’s a beautiful song, but also a song full of mean, sad characters who wallow in their meanness and sadness before reaching for something different and gentle, something they ultimately fall short of but are still, by virtue of being (fictional) humans, entitled to want. In one way, rewriting the words is an effort to make the song live up to expectations that it so intentionally bucks, to turn it from a Pogues song into something you can play on the radio as part of the soundtrack to an idealized “perfect” holiday. In another way, by recognizing that Hozier and Ed Sheeran and an a capella choir shouldn’t say a slur, it’s a kind of growth that maybe unintentionally captures the clumsiness of growth. These ill-fitting rhymes are imperfect new traditions, messy improvements that fit right in with the song and its story and this whole time of year.
I hope I never have another drunk Christmas, but I’m always aware that I can’t say that for sure. Those bar stool holidays were a way of shining up my everyday drinking, and I can see in them now a yearning for a different feeling that I eventually found. This year has been far from perfect for me, and it’s hard to have hope that next year will be better. But a weird day, like a weird lyric, can be OK. If your holiday isn’t what you want it to be, I hope you can find a way to follow the call in that desire. But if it just isn’t what everyone is telling you it “should” be, I hope you can instead honor what it is. You can have a weird one this year, an ill-fitting rhyme or an out-of-step day, and a different one next year, or maybe just the same one that you feel differently about. You can try out new words. You can write another verse.
