Why the Holiday Season Feels the Same Every Year (and Why the Lights Still Work)
There are those who experience Christmas with the naturalness of social mammals: lights on as early as November, themed playlists, collective migration enthusiasm. Not me. I belong to another species: a slightly twisted creature who, when faced with the first jingles, feels the same amazement as a hedgehog watching fireworks.
I don’t suffer Christmas—I study it.
I observe it as one would observe a natural phenomenon, a social experiment magnified beyond measure. It is a time of excess: obligatory happiness, unmanageable expectations, sudden nostalgia, seasonal paranoia, endless dinners. And above all, the rhetoric:
Christmas is magic.
Christmas is goodness.
Christmas is sharing.
Yes, of course. And I am Marie Antoinette.
The truth is that Christmas is an ambiguous animal: wonderful and toxic at the same time. An arena of Christmas micro-dramas: fathers who can’t find the right gift, uncles who philosophize over turkey, cousins with interchangeable boyfriends, traditions that no one remembers anymore but which are respected out of superstition. In the midst of it all, everyone tries not to deflate: to live up to their assigned Christmas persona.
For me, however, December has always had an extra nuance: a little personal short circuit. My birthday falls in the middle of the holidays, in that emotional gap where the world is already half drunk, half saturated, half tired. Everyone wishes everyone else well. Everyone exchanges gifts. Everyone participates in the grand choreography of “Happy Holidays!”.
And I, in the middle of it all, try to remember that — technically — it would also be my day.
They say that birthdays are special moments, rituals in which we are the protagonists. Maybe. Or maybe not. Growing up with a birthday swarm, camouflaged in a crowd of serial greetings, teaches you one thing: in December, there is no individuality, only flows.
And the gift? It’s usually halved. Not out of malice — out of logic: “I got you a Christmas present… come on, it counts double.”
The result: I feel overwhelmed and never really at the center of attention. Not that you always need a center, but when there is one, it’s nice to notice that you’re there.
Perhaps this feeling of being part of a larger movement, but always a little on the sidelines, has shaped my view of the holidays: affectionate, ironic, with a touch of structural disenchantment. A Christmas that is never perfectly in focus, never completely mine, always observed from behind the scenes.
And perhaps that is why, after years of observing this spectacle, this summer—yes, in June—I found myself drawing it. Not as a planned project, but as a symptom.
While it was 30 degrees outside and mulled wine was a threat, I drew crooked trees, tragic reindeer, characters trying to maintain their grace amid the madness of the holidays. I drew them as one draws nightmares that make you laugh: with affection, with a little ferocity, with that unconfessed melancholy that always accompanies December.
I asked myself: am I the only one?
Is it possible that everyone experiences December as an emotional Advent calendar rather than a small tragedy in four acts?
And then I realized that perhaps not.
That there are other creatures like me: rare, unclassified animals who don’t hate Christmas but breathe it ‘polluted’. Creatures who survive the holidays thanks to irony, who love rituals but distrust obligatory traditions, who seek beauty without the imposed glitter, who need a little distance to truly embrace what matters.
The Christmas Tragedy was born this way: not as a book to “tell the story of Christmas,” but as a way to convey this affectionately cynical sideways glance that unites those who go through December without conforming to clichés.
A Christmas that does not present itself as it should, but as it appears to those who experience it a little sideways.
Like me.
Like you, perhaps.
Working for months on this misaligned Christmas—my own, which I began drawing in June—I realized I was not alone. There is a secret genealogy of artists, writers, and filmmakers who have looked at the holidays with the same skewed gaze, as if December needed to be backlit to reveal its true form.
Cinema, above all, knows that Christmas is an emotional bomb wrapped in gold paper.
Think of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander: everyone remembers the Ekdahl family, the theater, the wonderful photography… but inside is one of the most ambiguous Christmases ever filmed: a sumptuous, brilliant celebration, overflowing with life, yet crossed by a very subtle shadow, as if every candle already knew how fragile that happiness was.
Or Compartment No. 6: it’s not a Christmas movie, but it carries the atmosphere of someone going through the holidays as a somewhat uncomfortable, somewhat poetic journey, alongside unlikely people who become mirrors in which to see ourselves better. In its own way, it’s Christmassy: it’s about encounters that seem random but instead rewrite a piece of our winter.
And then there are the openly anti-Christmas works, such as The Ref or A Midnight Clear, which remind us that Christmas can resemble a military operation disguised as a family dinner.
And Tokyo Godfathers, perhaps my favorite: three homeless people, a newborn baby, the most unlikely urban Holy Family. A film that makes you laugh and then bites (an essential category of my Christmas).
In literature, Christmas is a perfect crack for fractures:
Flannery O’Connor, with her sacred and disturbing violence;
Truman Capote, with A Christmas Memory, the unashamed sweetness of melancholy;
Shirley Jackson, who even without mentioning Christmas evokes the dark ritual potential behind every ‘celebration’.
They all have something in common: they use Christmas as a distorting lens through which to observe humanity.
It is the same impulse that, on a small scale, led me to draw The Christmas Tragedy: not to add another holiday story, but because Christmas is the perfect stage on which to recount the oddities of human behavior.
Christmas is always a story of characters:
those who want to make a good impression,
those who run away,
those who feel inadequate,
those who desperately try to save a family ideal that only exists in 1990s commercials.
The holidays amplify who we are and give it back to us with a suspicious glimmer.
When I was drawing, I wasn’t illustrating “Christmas”: I was drawing the people inside Christmas. Their attempts, their flashes of inspiration, their little inner breakdowns.
All those micro-tragedies that make you laugh as soon as you recognize them.
Scenes that, without wrapping paper, would seem to come from an Anderson film or a Jackson story.
That’s why I find Christmas that wobbles more sincere, the kind that doesn’t play the part too well, the kind that lets you see the strings of the set design. It’s more human, more fragile, more interesting to tell.
And every time I find a story, a film, or a book that deals with the holidays in this way, I feel like I’m entering a private room where rhetoric doesn’t exist and vulnerability is allowed without shame.
A bit like what happens between readers and artists.
And if we’re being honest, those drawings didn’t stop in June, July, or August. I continued until September—in spite of those who claim that “Christmas can only be drawn when the fog descends.” No way. I filled sheets of paper with crazy relatives, endless dinners, wrong gifts, emotional rediscoveries, sudden melancholy, and all the emotional zoology that December brings with it like an overly long scarf.
And yes: The Christmas Tragedy is technically finished—and already available for purchase—but Christmas stories continue to pop up like mushrooms after the snow. And knowing me, I’ll end up drawing them.
That’s why I’m asking for your help:
suggest books, films, stories, illustrators, choreography, performances, works of art, anything that made you think, “this would make sense at Christmas.”
From twisted fairy tales to bitter comedies, from noir to icy atmospheres, from a graphic novel that smells like snow to an essay on loneliness.
Everything can enter my Christmas imagination — an imagination that changes every year, just like Christmas.
And then, let’s face it: yes, deep down we still believe in Santa Claus.
Not the perfect, shiny red one from the adverts. Ours is a Santa Claus full of doubts, with a few aches and pains, a list of things that have gone wrong and a natural talent for last-minute disasters. One who has probably lost an oven glove in his sleigh, forgets half the presents and sets off again, grumbling: ‘Oh well, I’m on my way now’.
And maybe that’s why we love him more.
So yes: on the evening of December 24, we’ll gladly leave him a good bottle of whiskey on the windowsill.
May it serve as courage, comfort, or a necessary break between one Christmas tragedy and another.
And maybe, who knows, it will even bring a smile to his face—a crooked one. A real one.
PS: Recognize yourself in a few Christmas micro-tragedies? You’re not alone… and you can meet all these wonderfully flawed characters in The Christmas Tragedy.
