Live Like a Trust Fund Kid
At Christmas
Millions of people,
for generations of time
worked to make
your Christmas sublime
You can create culture. If you want a generational family, you have to.
The good news is that anyone can do it. The bad news is that it takes effort and judgment.
Culture is to groups what habits are to individuals. Culture and habits are the slow repetition of ideas and actions until they become almost unthinking. Until they become values and identity.
You can create almost anything into your culture if you put enough effort into it. You will have to think it, talk about it, do it, over and over and over. That’s if the larger culture is indifferent. If the larger culture is hostile, even more so.
But the easiest culture to create is the one where most of the work has already been done for you. The wind is at your back.
Take Christmas. Books, movies, TV, songs, poems, Currier and Ives lithographs, ready-made iconography, standard custom sets, your own memories. It’s all there for you. The work has already been done. All you have to do is do it.
Don’t worry that your Christmas will just get submerged into the larger cultural mass. Christmas is so large that just by doing what you do your Christmas will be customized. All you have to do is repeat it, or make sure your variations fit a theme.
The only real important thing is that you define your Christmas by what it is, not by what it is not. No Santa? Fine, but the point isn’t denying Santa. Be genial, merry, and easy about all the Santa stuff that you see around you, and do your version of Christmas with warmth and cheer. Less commercial? Fine, but make your holiday bright. Less secular? Also fine. So long as you feel joy.
Find something you can enjoy and be proud of and lean into it.
Fires in the fireplace.
Lights in the darkness.
Service.
This is Not a Holiday Gift Guide - The Steader Manifesto
Cozy.
Telling stories of Christmases long long ago.
Christmas is an enormous trust fund of cultural capital that has been invested for you. All you have to do is cash your check like a trust fund kid.
