A Nightmare for Christmas?
Wrapping up 2023 with this year's real Nightmare before, during and maybe even after Christmas.
I don’t really enjoy Christmas. Growing up it was always a focal point for arguments caused by overstimulation, mismatched expectations or my parents’ attempts to pretend our family was not falling apart. Since my mother passed, it’s become a time when that loss, and other related losses, feel particularly sharp. Christmas is marketed as a holiday to spend with family, yet for many of us this is neither possible nor desirable.
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I often prefer to ignore Christmas altogether or spend it in the tropics (my second home of Guatemala) where the warm days and distinct traditions bear less resemblance to the super-saturation of commercialised nostalgia that makes Christmas impossible to escape at home.
For Christmas 2023 it feels like there is nothing at all to celebrate. I’m not Christian but I grew up in a predominantly Christian context. I believe Jesus, if he did exist, had a powerful message of love and acceptance of difference and diversity to share with the world before it was corrupted by organised religion. But this year, the home of this Arabic Jew who dared to challenge both religious and imperial authority is being destroyed as we speak, his descendants annihilated and all evidence of their millenarian culture erased in a terrifying project of settler colonialism. Muslim and Christian Palestinians are rightly asking how can people in the West celebrate Christmas as if Christ’s homeland was not being actively destroyed?
Meanwhile in Guatemala, celebrations are taking place in a context of ongoing protests and increasing uncertainty about what will happen on January 14th when the president elect, Bernardo Arrévalo, is supposed to take power. We are all holding our breaths to see what the individuals and institutions who have been plotting for six months straight to prevent the democratic transition will do in the first few days of January. As I mentioned in a previous post, the fates of Palestine and Guatemala are intimately related through histories of imperial intervention from both the US and Israel.
I would be lying, however, to say that I won’t be taking a break. Nor am I here to shame anyone about their plans for the holiday season. But I would urge people to keep talking about Palestine, to keep doing whatever is within your power to continue pressing for an immediate ceasefire, access to humanitarian and medical aid for the hundreds of thousands of displaced and injured and for an end to the occupation.
Share information and content from reliable sources and from Palestinian journalists who continue to risk their lives in Gaza to report on what is happening there. The algorithms of various social media platforms have been working to block their content so the more you can share the better. I have been following four journalists in particular who share daily updates about developments in Gaza as well as the joys and struggles of Palestinians before and after the current assault on Gaza:
Wizard Bisan, a filmmaker, traveler, dreamer and Gaza’s Storyteller.
Noor Harazeen, Journalist and TV correspondent based in Gaza.
Plestia, a journalist and storyteller who just turned 22!
Motaz Aziza, a 24 year old photo journalist.
Boycott! The BDS movement is growing with some very recent successes including Puma dropping its sponsorship of the Israeli national football team.
Contact your government representatives (Ireland, UK, US, Global) to demand a permanent ceasefire, to call a halt to further settlement of the West Bank and for an end to the occupation.
Sign open letters from your specific sector supporting the call for a ceasefire. For instance, today I signed the letter from Scholars Against the War on Palestine ‘All I want for Christmas is a permanent Ceasefire,’ which has been signed by scholars such as Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Cornell R. West and others. Other industry specific letters include Queer Artists for Palestine, signed by two of my favourite drag queens Shea Couleé and Sasha Velour, Writers Against the War on Gaza, Musicians for Palestine and Artists for Palestine. If you know of others please drop them in the comments!
Donate! Israel continues to refuse entry of the majority of humanitarian aid into Gaza but those still working on the ground include the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. You can also donate an E-Sim to keep people in Gaza online in the face of widespread telecommunications blackouts.
Read about Palestine from Palestinian writers such as this new essay collection from Verso and Haymarket books just published From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine. You can download it for free here!
I aim to do take least one of these actions a day over the holidays. If you know of any other ways to help or useful resources to share please drop these in the comments!
There’s something in the air!
In recognition of my ambivalent feelings towards Christmas, I thought I’d wrap up 2023 with some thoughts one of my favourite movies from childhood: The Nightmare Before Christmas (TNBC). Is it a Halloween Movie? Is it a Christmas movie? Is it both?
The Nightmare Before Christmas (TNBC) premiered on October 29th 1993, just in time for Halloween. I was eight, going on nine, and I remember queuing up in the cold and wet street in front of Cork’s Capitol cinema to go see it. Even at that tender age my gothic sensibilities had been firmly established and I was delighted with the macabre take on Christmas where the ghouls of Halloween Town attempt to give Christmas a make-over.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 animated, gothic musical directed by Henry Selick and written by Tim Burton. Jack Skellington (Danny Elfman/Chris Sarandon) is the Pumpkin King: the embodiment of Halloween and the spiritual leader of Halloween Town. Bored and disillusioned with his annual routine, Jack wanders into the woods and stumbles across a mystical doorway into Christmas Town. Delighted and fascinated with by the novelty of snow and Christmas lights, he returns to Halloween Town obsessed with this new discovery and determined to put his own ghoulish spin on Christmas. After kidnapping the real Santa Claus, he appoints himself as the new Santy Claws, delivering haunted gifts to the children of North America before the army shoots him from the sky. Rejected by the real world of Christmas Jack must confront the consequences of his actions and his own frustrations and restore balance to the holidays by releasing Santa.
Halloween is canonically an autistic holiday, where the opportunity to dress up as someone else, put on a literal mask and indulge our dark side is embraced by many in the community. Whereas Christmas, with its forced merriment, forced socialising, disruptions to routines, sensory overload (lights and fireworks) prescribed foods and mandatory, organised fun is the least favourite holiday for many autistic people.
As a child it was a delight to watch a film so openly irreverent towards a holiday which was generally regarded as everyone’s favourite time of the year. I was won over by the music, the celebration of Halloween and most of all the magic of the animation in Jack’s gothic wonderland. When TNBC premiered in 1993 there never been anything like it on the big screen and it sparked my life-long love of stop motion animation. And, as with all movies featured in AutCasts, I was thrilled by a movie which so openly embraces outsiders and outcasts of all kinds.
This Christmas thing is not as tricky as it seems!
Jack is king of a town in which everyone is an outsider, where the ghouls, the freaks and weirdos all have a place. And yet we meet him when the weight of his crown and the monotony of Halloween celebrations has him pining for something different. He craves novelty and excitement and believes he has found it in Christmas Town.
Jack falls into a Christmas rabbit hole, shutting himself away from the town and his friends to read books and conduct experiments that will reveal to him the very essence of Christmas. Like many neurodivergent people, all other concerns fall to the wayside as he is consumed by this new obsession. After weeks of seclusion he emerges convinced he understands what Christmas is all about and is determined to remake it in his own image. He recruits the somewhat reluctant members of Halloween Town to prepare for their own version of Christmas that same year. The one dissenting voice is Sally (Catherine O’Hara) who foresees that all his plans will end in disaster.
Jack’s downfall is in failing to realise that his gothic sensibilities have no place in the season of joy and merriment. Despite all his research he never quite grasps the social conventions of Christmas. Instead of spreading cheer he sows terror. Blasted from the sky he is forced to confront his failures and the fact that he has strayed so far from his own path. His brush with our world reaffirms his identity as the Pumpkin King and he reclaims his throne, with Sally by his side.
Why does nothing ever turn out like it should?
While I still hold a soft spot for the movie, 30 years later I can see that TNBC is not without its problems. The racist characterisation of the film’s real villain, Oogie Boogie, is particularly uncomfortable. He is portrayed as so ghoulish and evil that he is an outcast within Halloween town, exiled to the underworld. Screenwriter Caroline Thompson apparently raised objections to the racist tropes embodied this character (gambling, lechery and the name itself is a racist slur) but Burton and Selick allegedly refused to make any changes. This adds yet another strike to Burton’s well-documented racism and anti-blackness.
You could argue that TNBC, more than any other film, would come to define the Burton aesthetic: a world populated by pasty-white, melancholy waifs with gothic inclinations. It’s hard not to feel that the Hot Topic-esque mass marketing of Jack Skellington’s grin has considerably diluted the original magic of the movie.
Sally is another disappointment. She gets to do very little in a movie where she spends most of her time trying to free herself from servitude to her Frankenstein-like creator and pining after Jack. We are meant to believe theirs is a great love affair despite the fact that Jack mostly ignores her. Sally does make a valiant attempt at rescuing the real Santa from the clutches of Oogie Boogie but she too becomes his prisoner and must be rescued by Jack.
Meanwhile Danny Elfman, who wrote the score and performed Jack’s musical numbers, has multiple allegations of sexual harassment against him. Once again, it becomes almost impossible to find non-problematic cultural artefacts produced by the so-called ‘great men’ of Hollywood.
For further commentary on The Nightmare Before Christmas you can check out The Bechdel Cast’s very tongue-in-cheek take(down) of this seasonal favourite or the Autism Through Cinema podcast for a more in-depth exploration of how neurodivergence influenced the movie and why it has resonated so strongly with neurodivergent audiences.
For a neurodivergent take on a Christmas family favourite, and a movie that still makes me cry from the opening credits, you can check out my post from last year on Home Alone.
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I'm weirdly reassured to hear that other peope have had concerns about that as a racist portrayal in The Nightmare Before Christmas - I'm white, so when I saw it again for the first time in years I wondered if I was reaching a bit in being uncomfortable with the character (hadn't realised the name was literally a slur) - it just felt to me like they were trying to present this as a black character who of course is villainous.
The other thing I find hard to stomach is the scientist who made and now controls Sally: it's a classic example of making a character who uses a wheelchair creepy, sinister and evil, to the point where his disability becomes visual shorthand for his being repulsive morally and physically: so it comes off not that Sally wants to get away from him because she's in a coercive control situation, but because he's revolting by his very nature. And while Henry Selick would later make more effort to engage with issues like racism, gentrification and the prison industrial complex's impact on Black communities in Wendell & Wild, it too has a sinister wheelchair-using character. I otherwise loved the movie, but that aspect is a slap in the face.
Where Christmas movies are concerned, Prancer (original, not remake) is right up there. Looking at it now, I read Jessica as an autistic child who is leaning into a special interest in Christmas to help her cope with her grief following her mother's death, all of which was certainly similar enough, if not identical to experiences of mine in childhood that it always just made a deep emotional sense to me. It's unabashedly sentimental, yet in a way that doesn't feel cheap or manipulative, because there's emotional truth there.
The storyline where Jessica befriends someone else isolated by grief, an older woman who has withdrawn from the community life of their small, struggling rural town, felt extra powerful to me because again, I could've seen that lady being autistic too, and we do have a way of finding each other...