I want you to picture a house. A nice big house in your typical lifeless and car-based suburban neighborhood of single family homes. Glowing candy canes on the front steps, a giant blowup Frosty on the lawn, lights of color that flash and dance and flicker in sync to a Christmas song with no epilepsy warning in sight. This house is so eye-popping that people come from around town and park their Tahoes on the curb just to bask in its seasonal splendor. What could possibly be wrong with this scenario? As it turns out, a lot.
Times are harder than they ever have been. Rent climbs and climbs, interest rates remain high, and all of these fucking Boomers and Gen X thumb their noses at us from the comfort of the homes they bought decades ago whenever we dare speak out about the state of the world. Yet during Christmas we drive our cars around like the backward peasants we are and gawk at their enormous sparkling country estates, homes of people who have the money and time and privilege to produce a Magic Kingdom equivalent light show on their lawn each Christmas season, just to revel in the subservience of the unquestioning masses genuflecting from the curb.
And the offense is compounded by the sheer hubris of it all, the declaration for the entire world, in a time of record inequality and environmental degradation, that the electrical bill is an afterthought, as is the energy waste and the light pollution. The Christmas lights, like the cars they drive and the clothes they wear, are nothing but diamond-studded reminders of the game, the one we all play, of winners and loses. We have things that you you will never have, the lights say, and we plan on keeping it that way.
We shouldn't be rewarding the richest people in town with the adulation they so desperately crave, making pilgrimages to their vacuous cul-de-sacs to ogle their illuminated manors as they protest new housing developments, short the stock market and bitch about their taxes. We should be ripping their lights from the rooftops, throwing bricks through their windows and burning their Christmas trees to the ground.
The lights keep us complacent. The lights keep us awestruck, appreciative. The lights tell us that the Christmas spirit—for which financial security has always been a prerequisite—somehow still belongs to us when deep down we know that it doesn't. The lights aren't saying"Merry Christmas" or even "Happy Holidays." They're saying "Let them eat cake."
How do we even go about reforming Christmas in all the different ways it must be reformed? It starts with the man in the sleigh, and we all know it's high time he retired.
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