Sedari Christmas: December 4-18, 2025
Write a short, humorous essay (in the style of David Sedaris or your own favorite humorist) about some part of Christmas or the holiday season.
The Submissions:
by Journal Kurtz
O, Christmas Tree!
It’s likely that the proprietors of the “Country Charm Tree Farm” chose those words at random, not bothering to double check the accuracy of the description, for when my wife and I steered our Subaru their way, crooning along with Sarah McLaughlin’s Christmas album, the city’s lights in our rearview mirror, we could not know that not one word of this family business would be true. No Country. No Charm. No trees. No farm.
We pulled into the driveway for a brick ranch house in a planned development triple-checking the address when a sign prompted us that this was the right place. A family argument was already in progress. What we surmised from the tail end of the hollering was that the adult son hadn’t moved the garbage cans like his mother asked. His defense was that he “shouldn’t hafta” because there was still ample parking in the driveway. Refusing to be deterred, I put on my best “We-come-in-peace” smiles and asked which field we should head to for the cut-your-own trees.
“Go ‘round the garage. You’ll see ‘em,” one of them barked our way.
Okay, so standing in the driveway of this suburban home, I had already surrendered the “country,” and the only charm to be had was if you were nostalgic for a scene from that ‘70s hit “All in the Family.” Those were the days, indeed. But the trees! The trees were in reach just beyond the garage. With A.M. Leonard folding tree saw in hand and celebratory hot chocolate in our future, my wife and I practically trotted behind the garage. There we were met with a great expanse of . . . lawns.
Ever the optimist, I had been hoping for fields that would signify the last vestiges of the founding farm upon which this planned community had been built. Or maybe I was expecting a polar vortex belonging to Santa himself that would whisk us to a self-perpetuating forest of conifers grown solely to serve urban lesbian’s seasonal dreams. But this was Archie and Edith’s backyard with four (four!) trees cowering as if bracing for a flora slaughter.
Our saw seemed too cruel a tool at that point. It felt better to have a dialogue with the firs to see if any of them would prefer to forgo life on the Country Charm Tree farm, none of those words being true, and come home with us. We promised to love and appreciate it daily, water it for as long as it could take in liquids, and, when it was ready to go to the great harvest in the sky, we’d bring it to Five Rivers MetroParks where a worker would sink it in the lake to provide habitat for fish. A noble life indeed.
I don’t remember how much we paid for the scraggly tree we brought home that day, but it was not enough. The story has sustained us for years and we are grateful. The tree? Well, the tree sleeps with the fishes, and the fishes are grateful, too.
by Captain Quillard
It’s been a few years since I last put up a Christmas tree. Most years, we’ve spent the holiday 800 miles away at my sister’s house, and the cost-benefit analysis of dealing with the hassle, the mess, and the expense of a tree that will only be seen by me and won’t be seen at all during the week of Christmas has led me to just skip the whole affair in favor of stapling a strand of lights around my front door and calling it good. But this year, my sister is coming home for Christmas. A couple of frank talks with her about the fact that our father turns 80 in a few months and probably shouldn’t be making many more 13-hour drives in snow and ice convinced her that she’d had a good run of us coming her way and maybe it was time for her to return the favor.
Determined to make my house more festive this year and tired of buying trees from the local Optimists’ lot or the Lowe’s greenhouse that were almost certainly cut down in September and dry out before Christmas, I did some research to find a tree farm where I could cut a fresh one myself. I worried that maybe the old-fashioned charm of the tree farm experience might be gone, given that evidently the first step in the process these days is PayPal-ing five bucks via an online form to reserve your 15-minute scheduled arrival window, but was pleasantly surprised to be transported back in time as I drove down a long, winding gravel lane to arrive by a red barn in front of a field of thousands of pines, be greeted by friendly, smiling young folks in Carhartt overalls, and handed a saw, a sled, and a piece of PVC pipe with tape marking each foot so I could gage whether or not a particular tree would fit under my ceiling. I was cheerfully instructed to pick any tree I liked, cut it down myself, bring it to the barn, and they’d shake out the loose needles, bag it, and help me affix it to my car to transport home. The whole experience was lovely, and made me feel a lot less cynical about the holidays, if only for an hour or so of trudging through a snowy field, looking for the perfect tree.
As much fun as I was having, wandering among the Canaan Firs, Norway Spruce, and Virginia Pines, telling myself “This one’s a contender – let’s keep it in mind and keep looking” and then completely forgetting where the contender was and what it looked like, and getting lost in the magic of an old-timey Christmas experience, I also had time to think about how strange so many of our holiday traditions really are. They don’t necessarily feel strange to us, because that’s how tradition works, I guess – you do something long enough and ritualistically enough and it becomes normalized – not even normalized so much as taken for granted as something you MUST do each year when the season comes around again. But if you were to step back and look at what we do each Christmas without the benefit of tradition, it turns out that a lot of it is pretty weird and makes very little sense. Imagine explaining to someone who’d never heard of Christmas that an absolutely essential part of the celebration is to bundle up the family, hacksaw in hand, and trudge through a field until you find the most beautiful expression of nature’s beauty among all the living trees, and then proceed to murder that conifer, drag it home, install it in your living room as if it were alive again to mock the pain of its demise, wrap it in electrical wires and decorate it with baubles, and then stare at it for the next few weeks, admiring its slow but certain death until the holiday passes and you unceremoniously dump it on the side of the road with your garbage. That person would never speak to you again, and might seek to have you committed as a danger to yourself and others. And yet, here I was, gleefully partaking in this sacrificial cult ritual with dozens of happy families, joyously calling out “Merry Christmas” to each other as they knelt in the mud to get a better angle at felling a gorgeous living thing by hacking through its life support system with a rusty blade. “Peace be with you!”
Returning home with my soft-needled prey, I began the process of illuminating and decking it with lights and shiny things, still thinking about how weird and nonsensical so much of our holiday celebration really is. As a non-religious non-believer, I won’t even get into how weird the whole “reason for the season” is to me, or how many things about the Baby Jesus story don’t make sense in my mind. I will say, however, that if anyone in that story demonstrates unwavering faith, it’s probably Joseph. I like to think I’m pretty patient and trusting, but if my girlfriend came home pregnant, I knew the baby wasn’t mine, and she told me it was an immaculate conception and she was carrying the son of god, I don’t know that my reaction would be “Sure, that checks out. Let’s get you to an inn. I’ll fire up the donkey.” I’ll also suggest that for being “wise men,” those three yahoos could’ve shown up with some more age-appropriate gifts. It just goes to show that the one-percenters have never been able to relate to the common people. “Thanks for the myrrh, Balthazar. It’s very thoughtful of you, although… um… some effing Pampers might’ve been more useful. I guess I should’ve registered at Barn, Trough & Beyond.” Not that the poorer people in attendance were any more understanding of Mary’s needs. Granted, I’ve never been pregnant before, but I can’t imagine having just given birth and being excited to hear some aspiring Keith Moon over in the corner, banging out a drum solo like he’s headlining Red Rocks. “Shall I play for you?” “You know what, Drummer Boy? I… I think I’m good. Did any of you wise guys bring Tylenol, or is it just incense over there?”
Religious weirdness aside, the secular parts of our Christmas traditions make just as little sense. Exhibit A? Santa. We call him Santa as though that is his first name, but in actuality it’s his title, as Santa means “Saint.” Calling him Santa is like thinking Dr. Phil’s first name is Doctor. This is, of course, ridiculous, because Dr. Phil’s first name, as we all know, is “idiot.” To be fair, we probably call him Santa because the man himself can not decide on a first name. Is he Claus? Is he Nicholas? Is he Chris? Who knows. And who cares, as long as we have a mythical figure we can point to in order to keep everyone in line and behaving while we lie to them about his existence in order to extort and coerce them into acting the way we want them to act for fear of being punished if they don’t. But, wait – I said I wasn’t going to talk about Jesus.
Santa Claus, if that is his real name, is a truly weird concept. Here is the ultimate recluse, living in isolation like a militia man in the most remote spot possible, getting fat on a steady diet of cookies and (one assumes) reindeer meat, keeping tabs on children and rating them like some kind of NSA-Epstein hybrid, wearing an all-red suit that you KNOW no white man could ever pull off, and coming out of hiding only once per year to reverse-burglarize your home. He and the missus are running some sort of sweat shop up there, forcing little people into what essentially amounts to slave labor in god knows what kind of working conditions, and yet somehow, he is never investigated. We are to believe he is human, but at the same time clearly possesses some sort of magic that allows him to be in every house on earth at precisely midnight. Even when you factor in time zones, that’s still very difficult. More magic still is his ability to fit his presumably diabetic frame down your two-foot-wide chimney, and even more magical is how he comes down your chimney when your house doesn’t have a chimney. God help him if he tracks soot on my good rug, I’ll just tell you now. Despite having enough magic to essentially teleport his jolly ass to each house simultaneously, we are to believe that he travels there by old fashioned sleigh, pulled not along the ground, mind you, but through the air by (for some reason) flying ungulates. Makes sense so far. Santa is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-spying and omniscient, but claims to not know what you want for Christmas unless you come see him near the appliances department at your local Filene’s Basement to sit on his lap and whisper in his ear. Eww. Meanwhile, the same parents who are certain that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring out of the cellar of a Sbarro will stand in line for two hours for the privilege of handing their child over to this creep.
The older I get, the less tolerance I have for Christmas music. But I recently got myself a record player and had confiscated from my parents’ house some of the old classic Christmas albums we used to listen to every year as children, so as I trimmed the tree I put them on for nostalgia’s sake. It was fun to travel back to my childood through the voices of Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, and others, and it made the decorating process more festive, but as I listened I was reminded of just how weird most Christmas carols are, too. First and foremost, there are just so many songs about bells. Songs about how bells jingle, how they are silver, and how much we all just really, really love bells. In any other genre, telling the record company you’ve got a great new song about how fantastic bells are would get you laughed out of the industry, but call it a Christmas carol and you can not only record a song solely about bells – you can record 12 of them if you like. More bell songs, please. Almost as prevalent as songs about bells are songs about sleighs. Mind you, I know that cars didn’t always exist, but most of these songs were written in the ‘30s to ‘60s, and I just find it hard to believe that travel via open sleigh was all that common in that period, nor that it was half as fun as these songs say it is. Oh! Oh, what fun.
Then there are the songs that introduce us to some of the other deeply strange characters that have become such vital parts of our Christmas celebration. Enter, Rudolph. This popular song starts off with a very odd introduction, in which Gene Autry (in the most famous version) presumes that you of course are familiar with the names of the original eight reindeer, taking for granted that you already know them well. He then asks if you remember one other reindeer named Rudolph, with an intonation that seems to bet you probably don’t and you need a song to introduce you to him, but immediately admits that this is ”the most famous reindeer of all.” This is unhinged behavior. “Yeah, sure, you obviously know all the lesser-known reindeer. But… BUT! Do you remember the most famous one?!”
Most of these carols, especially the ones for kids, are designed to impart some kind of moral truth or uplifting story about things always working out for the side of good. The gospel of Rudolph, however, teaches us that you will be shamed, taunted, and ostracized for your differences, unless those differences can be exploited by those in power for their benefit. THEN, all the reindeer will love you.
After Rudolph comes Frosty the Snowman, a story that literally has no connection to Christmas, and also seems to have no message or moral or point other than “I swear that snowman came to life, and no one believes me, but I promise you it happened.” The entire tale is that a snowman was alive long enough to dance and play with some children, run through town (inexplicably making the sound “thumpity-thump-thump” as he went), notice it was getting warm, and tell the children, “Look… uh… I gotta’ jet. But, yeah, um, I’ll be back… someday.” This song feels like the projection of emotions from someone whose dad went out for cigarettes and never came back. In other words: a Christmas classic.
I kept trimming and the carols kept coming, each one having at least one line that made me shake my head:
“Remember, Christ our savior was born on Christmas day.” Yeah. No kidding. That’s… um… that’s why we CALL it “Christmas.” Would you also like me to remember that Lou Gehrig got Lou Gehrig’s Disease?
“Holy infant, so tender and mild.” Gladys, you simply must give me your recipe. This infant is to die for. SO tender and mild. Just delicious.
“You better watch out. You better not cry… Santa Claus is coming to town.” This song is a straight-up mafia shake-down. Nice little childhood ya’ got here. Be a shame for Santa to have to come by and change all that.
“There’ll be scary ghost stories…” I think you might be thinking of the wrong holiday.
“While I tell of yuletide treasure.” Treasure? What is this, A Very Special Goonies Christmas?
“On the twelfth day of Christmas…” Hold up. At best, this is serious stalker behavior. At worst, it feels like it’s somehow a hate crime. One ring would’ve been enough. Five is starting to make me think about rounding up some hobbits for a quest. I do not remember ever expressing an interest in birds, let alone my own private aviary. And now the lords and the pipers and… and… and the MILK MAIDS?! What on earth is wrong with you? A restraining order feels too quaint at this point. I mean this sincerely: you need serious help. Take all these people and go. The birds, too. I want them gone and I can’t believe I even have to say that. You can keep the jewelry. Just go. Leave the tree. I do enjoy a holiday pear, I must admit. Jesus. This is why I don’t date.
The tree was up and decorated and looking mighty festive, I must say. The albums played a little longer, reminding me that as a child I thought “Feliz Navidad” was “Police never die,” and that if they’re going to stop making pennies then I’d better stock up on haypennies. Christmas, I decided, was truly an incredibly weird time filled with weird traditions. But somewhere in all that weirdness were things I still enjoyed, and I was really looking forward to spending the next few weeks watching my tree die.
Next Week’s Assignment:
We’re all busy during the holidays, so we’ll take three weeks instead of one for this assignment. Make a list of things you want to leave behind in the new year. Tangible, intangible, behaviors, thoughts, habits, people, whatever. Decorate that list in some artistic way. Burn the list, and scatter its ashes to the wind. Feel cleansed (whether you believe in this kind of thing or not) and ready to start fresh.