Have you seen the “Grinch prank” video trend? Bad parenting, yes. But also a nod to the conflicts, ancient and modern, embedded in Christmas.
Contrary to what Bill O’Reilly would tell you, there has never been a “war on Christmas.” Rather, Christmas itself has always been a battleground over love, dignity, and resources. What we’re really fighting over is who gets care in systems built on scarcity and extraction.
Vignette 1: The Original Creche
Vignette 2: Krampus
Vignette 3: Dickens, Chekhov, and Andersen
Vignette 4: The Christmas Truce, 1914
Vignette 5: Dr. Seuss and the Grinch
Show Notes
Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Match Girl. Copenhagen, 1845.https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10623
Boyle, James. “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.” Law and Contemporary Problems 66, no. 1–2 (2003).https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol66/iss1/2/
Chekhov, Anton. “Vanka.” 1892.https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13418
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843.https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46
Imperial War Museums. “Christmas Truce, 1914.”https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/christmas-truce-1914
Imperial War Museums. “Letter Describing the Christmas Truce.”https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030000503
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. The Principles of Socialism and the War of 1914–1915. Marxists Internet Archive.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/princip/
McCoy, Michael. “What Is Tinsel Made Of? (and How It Changed Over the Years).” Chemical & Engineering News, December 15, 2014.https://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i50/Tinsel-Made.html
Mitterauer, Michael. “Peasant and Non-Peasant Forms of Family Organization in Relation to the Physical Environment and the Local Economy.” Journal of Family History 2, no. 2 (1977).https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/036319907700200203
Nel, Philip. Dr. Seuss: American Icon. New York: Continuum, 2004.https://books.google.com/books?id=Yt4QAQAAIAAJ
Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/171502/the-battle-for-christmas-by-stephen-nissenbaum/
Restad, Penne L. Christmas in America: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.https://global.oup.com/academic/product/christmas-in-america-9780195043659
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691018448/consumer-rites
Science History Institute. “History and Future of Plastics.”https://www.sciencehistory.org/topics/plastics
Smithsonian Magazine. “The Origin of Krampus, Europe’s Evil Twist on Santa.” December 4, 2015.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-origin-of-krampus-europes-evil-twist-on-santa-180957438/
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Hello, everyone.
It's Matthew here.
This brief is called Class Wars on Christmas.
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So there's this trend on YouTube.
Lots and lots of instances of family videos in which parents prank their very young children on Christmas morning by having dad or an uncle or someone dress up in a Grinch suit, barrel roll through the front door, stuff the presents into garbage bags, rip up the ribbons and bows in the process, and trash the decorations while the kids wail in horror.
I watched this one Grinch tear all the stockings down from their nails on a wooden staircase, leaving like threads and strips of fabric behind.
Now, there's a range of intensities to these breach and clear operations.
Some Grinches play the coward and allow the five-year-olds to jump on them and beat them up until they drop the loot and stagger out the door, defeated.
And in these videos, I think the holiday might be restored fairly quickly after the interruption of, you know, an intense joke that is also self-evident.
But then there's some Grinches who charge into the room in all seriousness like it's the UFC octagon or like they're playing Call of Duty.
They're picking up weeping three-year-olds and tossing them onto the couch.
They're ripping ornaments off the trees and smashing them.
They're yanking the tree itself out of the stand while the tree water sloshes out and the lights flicker.
And they're yelling at these kids who are still in their pajamas, screaming in terror.
There was one video in which the Grinch crashed into the room where another dad or uncle in a Santa suit had already been doling out candy.
And so the Grinch tackled Santa and then pretended to elbow smash him into the fireplace tiles.
Now, often in the margins of these videos, you'll see a mom or maybe a grandmother or aunt trying to comfort a clinging child.
Now, I know about the full spectrum and depravity here because AI-run channels make compilations of these and then just throw them together like it's all the same joke because of course AI doesn't know what a joke is.
And the other conformity between them is that the Grinch suits appear to all be the same brand.
The same trashy green polyester fur, the same crude felted plastic masks.
It's as though Party City or Walmart or Costco identified a holiday costume demand from sweaty dads back in June and then boosted their overseas production and national distribution accordingly.
Now, I imagine that many of you may share a similar visceral and psychological response to this.
I'm not sure what kind of person I would have to be to think this was a neat idea.
to destroy a moment like this for a child, to make them cry for your own purposes, and then to film them crashing out and then post that to make strangers laugh.
I also think that for a lot of folks, this will trigger memories of other forms of intergenerational retribution.
Like there's a long tradition of terrifying or hazing kids just for the laughs, and it carries many feelings and rationalizations with it.
You know, this will toughen you up, or hey, my parents did it to me and I turned out fine.
Now, I don't doubt my visceral responses here, and I don't think you should either.
This is objectively bad parenting.
But at the same time, when I feel like I'm sliding into a zone of like personal reactivity and disgust, as in like, who are these hooligan parents and what kinds of emotional wrecks are they raising?
And how are they going to be assholes to my kids?
I get this small red flag that goes up in my brain that reminds me to zoom out and look at the historical themes and material conditions from which a trend like this might emerge.
With the Grinch prank, at least two threads come out at me and they tangle together.
One is ancient and one is modern.
Now, the ancient thread is the perennial shadow figure in mythology and folklore.
Like if there has to be a Santa, he's got to have an evil doppelganger.
No festival of light is meaningful without the threatening outer dark.
No gift comes without its danger.
No celebration will go unpunished or undisrupted.
You are never as safe or as loved as you think.
And when tragedy strikes, it's good to have an explanation for it.
The modern thread is a little bit different.
It's about the struggle over resources and power and the class conflicts that attend that struggle and how these conflicts are resolved or deferred or sustained.
I don't think the Grinch prank can work without some kind of driver of resentment, a feeling of needing to get back at these kids for all the trouble they cause, to avenge the work and the generosity you had to put into the holiday and into their lives in general.
It's a form of equalizing behavior.
The kids get their joy through their presence, but what do you get?
But more work, more debt, more loss, maybe some socks.
If it seems abstract and too nerdy leftist to propose that the Grinch prank is an iteration of class war between the class of adults and the class of children, maybe think about how children in group scenarios are treated as an amorphous lump.
You know, lineups for recess at school, birthday parties, school trips, sports teams.
Everything's about rounding up the kids, getting the kids in line.
Are the kids settling down?
And so in the Grinch prank, daddy's going to dress up and scare the kids, the kids being an undifferentiated, squirming, snotty mass, sticky with waffle syrup and spilled orange juice.
In some of the prank videos, it seems like there are several families together.
There's a lot of kids.
Maybe these are extended families.
Maybe the neighborhood got together.
But the kids are all lumped together in these activities under the assumption, I think, that they're all going to have and deserve the same experience and that they will all more or less get over it.
They will all together understand that life is not predictable, that they might not deserve the generosity of the world, and that love comes with conditions calibrated to your place in the social order.
So, this is my opening reflection on the class wars on Christmas, a festival where prickly personal psychologies collide with and echo deep myths and perennial political struggles.
And I'm going to focus on that last category with the following vignettes, because I think that the political stories of Christmas, which stubbornly resist all religious flattening and laundering, are a source for the disquiet that haunts the season.
The paradoxes of gathering with family but feeling alienated, or being swept up in a consumerist frenzy that you know will never fill the whole of the darkest night.
So, if this season is disturbing to you, I don't think it's your fault, because in addition to whatever personal stories you are working through, there's also a disturbing zeitgeist story running in the background about how we decide who deserves love and dignity and resources in a time of danger.
Now, I say vignettes because these are not full histories.
Each one could be their own essay or a book, but hopefully, they each name and capture a piece of the historical tension in such a way as to illuminate and relax their effects, as well as in a way that feels digestible for a holiday audio format.
Vignette 1, The OG Crush.
So, if anyone thinks that Christmas could ever be uncomplicated, I don't think they've thought through the symbology of the original nativity.
So, attended by prophetic signs, a baby boy is born on the straw of a cowshed to unhoused migrant parents.
It's not clear who the father is, but Joseph has committed to caring for his friend and wife and has supported her on the road.
They're in transit to a reporting station where the imperial Roman authorities will register them for taxation.
The first witnesses to the birth are barn animals, including the ass Mary rode in on.
And then the shepherds sense something strange has happened and they come to visit with their sheep.
Now, convention has brought the Magi, Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar, together with the shepherds for this scene, even though one gospel has them arriving as much as two years later.
But their homage signifies an inversion of worldly powers, embodied by outsiders to both the religious culture of the Jews and the Roman occupiers.
These are wealthy lords and proto-scientists, astrologers, and they are seen to recognize the dignity of an impoverished child, and they predict his importance from the stars, and they provide his family with resources and care.
Now, in reaction, Herod the Great, the Jewish client king of Rome, allegedly orders the slaughter of all male children under two in the region of Bethlehem.
Now, I say allegedly because this event is not corroborated outside of the gospel in which it appears, and many biblical scholars believe it's a later interpolation that is meant to set Jesus up as a Moses-like figure, because Herod's action is echoing Pharaoh's edict during the captivity that male children of the Hebrews should be drowned in the Nile.
So, whether this is historical or literary, The baby in the stable is a pole star of hope and innocence surrounded by empire and cruelty, and he provokes at least some of the elite of his day to share their power with him.
Now, obviously, it's going to be impossible to get from there to the Grinch or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer without a ton of confusion and struggle and cognitive dissonance along a very winding road.
Vignette 2.
Krampus.
Now, as the Christian church spreads into the cold north of Europe, it confronts indigenous traditions or reactions to the cultural conquest, as well as seasonal rituals and the spirits that govern them.
And when it came to Christmas, the clerics were faced with a challenge in selling new converts, maybe coerced converts, on a theological story that would displace their more animistic lived experience.
From the church's point of view, the forces of danger that attended the birth of Jesus were neutralized by the theology of the resurrection.
Considering the fragility of the stable and the precarity of the little family happens now through the triumphalism of Jesus' universal kingship.
And if you add to that an emergent Christology that said that all of the humble beginnings were just part of a theater for the masses, that God was pretending to be a child in order to better save his children and so on, we have a kind of, you know, cut and sealed case.
Now, none of this would wash, however, with more holistic ways of being in the world where no single event or ideal can resolve the precarity of life marked by regular famine and fuel scarcity.
So then folklore steps in to provide the explanations and the warnings and the discipline.
In Iceland, the Grilla emerges as a child-devouring winter monster to counter the whimsy of solstice partying.
The Scandinavian Nysse or Tompte was a Norse land spirit, part of an ancestor cult prone to punitive rage against rulebreakers in the home.
And then we have the German Frau Perchte as a shape-shifting demon by turns beautiful and hideous.
She blesses all houses that observe the seasonal taboos, but she also polices women's productivity in the home.
And in her wrathful form, she punishes the lazy, slitting open their bellies and stuffing them with straw or stones.
But then the Alpine Krampus is also very important.
He has roots in the horned, bell-ringing winter spirits associated with fertility, hunting, and communal discipline.
As he encounters Christianity in the Middle Ages, he becomes assigned to accompany the cheery Saint Nicholas through the villages to threaten, to beat, to chain, or to carry off disobedient children, while cracking whips to drive out evil spirits.
He is the anti-Santa Claus, the shadow of gift-giving who policed obedience at the moment of abundance and drives home the idea that generosity and bounty is conditional and fickle.
Now, maybe this was the very first of many wars on Christmas, not quite rooted in class, but in a clash of paradigms where indigenous cultures will not accept the most absurd of Christian promises that believing in Jesus will somehow exempt you from history and the ebb and flow of suffering.
Now, the Christians fought hard to assert this new order, with clerics condemning the indigenous spirits in sermons or banning Krampus from festivals and ridiculing these characters as superstition.
Well, of course, they were preaching the virginity of Mary.
The drive also had colonial overtones, because the goal was to eradicate local community tools of social relations as the bishops and their moral theology asserted a new kind of top-down social control.
Now, maybe you recall the office episode in which Dwight Schroot shows up at the Christmas party dressed in furs and bearing birch switches for beating children.
He was playing the authentic Pennsylvania Dutch version of Krampus called Belschnickel.
And the fact that he has this role to play is not just a quirky Pennsylvania Dutch anachronism.
It also shows that while the Catholics and Protestants were never able to fully eradicate the indigenous spirits, they could domesticate them by juxtaposing them with the normative Santa and the increasingly bourgeois manners of the time.
And this is why no one is really afraid of Dwight in his Belschnickel getup.
They reserve their fear for the corporate raiders who are targeting Dunder Mifflin for takeover.
Vignette 3.
Charles Dickens, Anton Chekhov, and Hans Christian Andersen.
From about the 15th century onward, the long process of enclosing public lands, which had always been used by serfs for grazing, gleaning, guerrilla gardening, and collecting windfall fruit and fuel, eventually privatized the earth itself and forced the poor to urbanize into new manufacturing centers powered by coal and steam.
The capitalist mode of production exploded, crystallizing class differences between those who owned the means of production and those with nothing to sell but the labor of their bodies.
And as the private property stores of the bourgeois expanded, so too did the privatization of public space and ritual.
Christmas had previously been a church event, a public square event, but rising wealth for the lucky few shifted the focus of the season indoors, into parlors with decorations, parties, lavish dinners, cozy gift times.
And this aligned with a broader awareness and increasingly popular artistic depictions of enclosed household spaces.
But when those household spaces of the bourgeois are both enclosed and gentrified, and they have windows, there will always be workers or the unemployed or the imiserated on the outside looking in.
And out of that contradiction emerges some key staples of 19th century Christmas literature.
In a Christmas carol, Charles Dickens tackles soaring class inequality by offering a peephole into the putrefying wealth of Ebenezer Scrooge while we watch Bob Cratchit, his clerk, freeze in the unheated office and fret over the health of his youngest child, Tim.
Dickens does not directly challenge the capitalism that generates the tragic material of his stories.
He pretty much just observes it in great detail.
And in Scrooge's case, he opts for a spiritual shift provoked by a haunted knight in his own mansion.
And so Scrooge emerges on Christmas Day as a changed man who will be more generous and mindful of his blessings.
He's committed to becoming a nicer capitalist.
So the eternal question on the left is whether this is a good start or will it simply stabilize an irreparable system for a short time.
Now, then there's Anton Chekhov.
And in a micro story called Vanka, Chekhov writes about a young serf writing a letter to his grandfather begging to be saved from poverty and the beatings of his feudal master.
He writes himself almost into a hallucination of his grandfather appearing by the warm stove, but the story ends with us knowing that the boy is still alone, still shivering, that the relief was only in his mind, and that as soon as dawn broke, he would be back to work in the cold again.
But the most complicit and maudlin story in this genre is Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl.
Feminist and Marxist critics have long read this 1845 story as an indictment of how capitalism and patriarchy naturalize the expendability of poor girls by rendering their labor, in this case, she's trying to sell matches, their suffering and their death morally invisible to bourgeois society.
Anderson appeals to charity and religious consolation to balance out unpaid care, child labor, and female sacrifice.
And the final scene with the silent, angelic grandmother indicts a social order that converts real deprivation into sentimental transcendence.
None of these three writers directly challenge the cruelty of their era in these Christmas stories.
Chekhov, I think, comes closest to full realism in letting the scenario simply shine without distilling any moral lesson out of Vanka's shivering misery.
But what these writers do keep alive is this ancient conflict between the vulnerability of the unhoused child or immiserated family on the darkest night of the year and the power structure that surrounds them and threatens them.
The context has changed from the inequalities of Iron Age imperialism to the inequalities of 19th century capitalist life.
But they are writing about it openly, although helplessly, and their subject is class war, illuminated by blazing Yule logs.
Vignette number four, The Christmas Truce.
On Christmas Eve and day of 1914, British and German soldiers on the front in northern France spontaneously began to sing carols to each other from their trenches.
Gradually, they climbed out to greet each other in no man's land, exchanging cigarettes and chocolate and schnapps.
They took photos, they arranged impromptu choirs, they helped recover each other's dead.
Some kicked a football around.
Now if we understand that the Great War, as it was then called, was a war over a failing imperial order with colonial powers sacrificing their working-class men for national honor, the fact that the military and political brass at that time did whatever they could to suppress news of the truce should come as no surprise.
Because that day saw working men throw caution to the wind to realize they had more in common with each other than with the superiors who sent them to kill and maim.
Military censors either burned or redacted letters home that described the truce because high command didn't want families to agitate against their war.
Some letters got through, however, and so the brass on both sides forbade further truces after 1914 and also increased the punishments for fraternization to the level of treason.
But they also took it farther by scheduling artillery bombardments and other must-execute operations for the days around and including Christmas Day in 1915, 16, and 17.
Reflecting on this in 1915 in a pamphlet called Socialism and War, Lenin wrote, quote, fraternization between the soldiers of the belligerent nations is a symptom of the awakening of class consciousness among the oppressed masses.
But this awakening will remain weak, sporadic, and helpless unless it is consciously developed into a struggle against the ruling classes of all countries, unquote.
So this was an amazing moment.
And had it spread in its own quiet quitting revolution, the world might be very different today.
But this is why today's there's a war on Christmas right-wing culture warriors never bring up the Christmas truce, because it wasn't their kind of traditional.
It was anti-nationalistic, anti-militarist, anti-hierarchy.
It offered a vision of Christmas as a universal festival rather than a besieged national tradition.
Vignette number five, Theodore Geisel's intervention.
Remember that I said at the top that these vignettes do not make a full and continuous history?
I just want to underline that again, because now I'm skipping ahead by 45 years to the American post-war hegemony.
In that interim, from my admittedly brief reading, the contradictions and class conflicts of Christmas persist in the interwar period, but they carry with them a great war trauma that prompts manufacturers to turn back to the Edwardian aesthetics that predated all the terrible bloodshed.
This was the world of burgundy, velveteen domestic interiors, pastoral oil paintings, gently bubbling samovars, mother-of-pearl cameos, and the Christmas crackers of a sentimental childhood.
That aesthetic, originally developed as a defensive response to accelerating modernity and industrialization, attempted to preserve in amber a protective nostalgia for those who could afford it, to preserve a more innocent time against the turmoil of revolution and the shame of machine gun slaughter.
But not even the Christmas decorations were free of the shadows of wars in which mainly the poor died.
I'll give an example.
Tinsel on trees, well, in the 18th century, where it emerges first, it had been a luxury item made from actual hammered silver, you know, cut into tiny thin strips.
And this was both costly, but also it easily tarnished by the soot of tree candles.
And of course, because the strands were so small, they were hard to polish.
A little bit later on, tin and lead entered bourgeois homes by century's end as a more affordable tinsel and a byproduct of the food canning and ammunition industries.
But by the 1930s, the Great War's innovations in using aluminum for airframes and engine fittings had produced a secondary product from its shavings and tailings, democratically priced tinsel.
But by the time Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss, is writing The Grinch, which is where we started today and where we'll end, the vast World War II production capacity for the new plastics that had pumped out parachutes and acrylic plane domes and a thousand varieties of cord turned its attention to things like tinsel that wouldn't actually cut your hands to ribbons while draping it over tree branches like the metal types did.
So the tinsel you pick up today at Walmart or Target is basically that same stuff with a few environmental upgrades in the production process.
And Dr. Seuss was writing into that bright new world overflowing with plastics, with the infinitely pliable aesthetics of plastic.
He was drawing his figures into its logic with these smooth, bulbous, injection mold-like forms that were made for flexibility and bend and bounciness.
And the shadow side of that exuberance was his realization that something was off, unsustainable, unreal, contradictory.
And that line of his thinking culminated in the Lorax story published in 1971, the one where the Lorax says, I speak for the trees, who will speak for the trees.
But he was pointing at it in 1957 with his story about the Grinch, a strange social outcast who peers in at the Whoville Christmas celebrations and sees nothing but delusional hypocrisy and consumerism.
He sees happiness centered on commodities that will wind up in the landfill beyond Mount Crumpet.
In his strange green fur and simmering rage, the Grinch recalls Krampus, but with a modern spin.
He's not the old primal goon beating up naughty children on the solstice.
He's an internalized character, an alienated outsider whose resentment targets commodities more than people, a person who disciplines through withholding rather than terror.
So there's this shift from external natural world magical punishment to an internalized moral correction under modern capitalism.
But here's the aspect that makes the Grinch a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary character.
After his encounter with Cindy Liu Hu, whose kindness and forgiveness gives him pause and allows him to more clearly hear the song the Who's are singing even after their houses have been stripped bare, after his heart grows three sizes and he becomes a blubbering sentimentalist, he doesn't just participate in the festivities.
He returns all of the commodities.
And why does he do that?
Because the Who's have proven that they don't need them, and so their simplicity must be rewarded.
They get to have the cake of their natural goodness, but also eat it too.
The notion that the commodities of Christmas would or should disappear because they are excessive or polluting or represent vanity or exclusion or exploitation, that's all just a bad dream.
In the Lorax, the message gets more stark.
But in the Grinch, Seuss is trying to address the moral psychology problem of capitalism, that consumerism can make us forget what is really meaningful.
But he's not really touching the deeper problem, which is that as long as material production creates crises of abundance and lack and inequality, the celebration of Christmas will carry deep contradictions.
He's saying to the American Who's, you are fundamentally good at heart, and you are not corrupted by your consumption.
And so please carry on, but according to your most noble selves.
No wonder it is such a well-loved story.
It is a moral check, but also a moral pass.
By offering the American Who's a borderline spiritual message of you can be in the world but not of it, Seuss makes the class war at the heart of production disappear.
Because whether the commodities are under the who trees or bundled away in his burglary bags, they seem to have just come from nowhere, like magic.
So Seuss gave it a whirl, and I appreciate the effort, but I don't think his resolution eases the confusion of staring at a pile of stuff in the store and wondering if you can afford it, or thinking more deeply about where it comes from and who got paid what for making it, or finally seeing some of it in your house under the tree and realizing that it can never represent the love you want to show your children.
Christmas remains a high point of capitalist contradiction.
It ensnares generosity, care, and universal goodwill in hyper-commodification, debt, unpaid gendered labor, and surplus production.
It encourages us to buy, perform, and exhaust ourselves to momentarily idealize the human relations that capitalism is eroding.
So coming back to our hooligan parents, who doesn't have moments where they want to put on a Grinch suit and mess that shit up, but for good, to show the world what a fragile illusion it all is?
So my title today was Class Wars on Christmas.
And if you thought I was going to go off on Bill O'Reilly complaining about a diversifying and secularizing America in which progressives make earnest attempts to support Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, eh, whatever.
I think we know that's just ethno-nationalist crap.
It's obvious what they're doing, and it's banal.
What's less obvious to me is the lie at the heart of any fascist project, that the golden age purportedly ruined by outsiders or sexual deviants never really existed.
I mean, what stable and homogenous Christmas are these goobers like O'Reilly nostalgic for?
When was that time of peace and plenty and contentment they're referring to, if it's not more than a moment in their own childhoods in which the drunken yelling was quiet for, you know, an instant and they glimpsed the stars overhead?
There's never been a war on Christmas, because Christmas itself has always been a war.
A war over who deserves love and care in times of stress, first in the winter of nature and now in the winter of capitalism.