It’s 2025. Snow is falling in London, coating the city in a quietude that feels correct. It’s the aftermath, the empty club in which Sally Lippman was never seen again. The sound of an empty spirit glass being served in an empty room, with no music playing. The festive lights might have been unplugged, but their shadow lingers in the corners of our minds. While the English-speaking world has long since discarded their wrapping paper and boxed away their tinsel, in Spain we celebrate Christmas until the 6th of January. Something about Three Kings – I don’t even know, I have only read the Book of Revelations, not the whole thing.

Christmas is exhausting. Even as the days march forward, I’m still recovering. I really wanted to write about Christmas (in the Spanish sense), even though I am late. As I sit and type, snow falls outside, soft and slow, as if to mock my frantic pace. And yes, I have been watching too much Sex and the City lately, so it has been hard to avoid questioning a big fat shallow question at the end of each paragraph.

So, fuck it, it is still Christmas in my book, and I shall talk about Christmas.
As an expat (I am not allowed to say immigrant, because I am European), Christmas feels like an obligation. As someone who goes back to their parent’s house, Christmas feels like a trauma throwback. As a queer person, Christmas feels like a punishment. As a person obsessed with running away from mediocrity, Christmas feels like a nightmare.
And I get it, yes, I seem like a contrarian, an unbearable bohemian entity that criticizes everything behind some thick-framed glasses. It is not like that.

I don’t hate Christmas because I’m trying to be the self-proclaimed Grinch of the diaspora. I hate Christmas because it demands too much of me—too much from all of us. It’s an emotional overdraft, one we keep maxing out year after year. The nostalgia is weaponized, the traditions are hollowed out, and the expectation is that you play along, no matter how fragmented you’ve become.

Christmas might encompass many things I hate, such as nuclear traditional families, straight people being happy, planning meals, eating meals and then talking about those meals, and horrible aesthetics. But I understand that historically, we humans have developed the need for creating feasting rituals in winter. We have always loved stuffing our faces around the winter solstice. We have always been obsessed with the skies and the sun, so we always celebrated the return of the sun after the longest night of the year. Even the Romans loved celebrating Saturnalia around this time, in a celebration of winter, giving gifts, and performing societal role reversals and all that. Then the Christians came and appropriated every single bit, and after, capitalism devoured it, giving us what we have today.

Obligations, Coca-Cola and Mariah Carey.

Just like everything else, I live in the dilemma of enjoying being a contrarian while being fully self-aware of it (and its implications). I enjoy Charli XCX, but I read essays from Jia Tolentino. I watch brain-rot TikToks and I enjoy Pasolini. I like being a pedantic gay, but also, I am fully aware that pedantic gays are insufferable.

Therefore, I do believe that my hatred for Christmas is more than pure angst. There’s something intrinsically melancholic about how hopeful I feel every time during these festive times. I hate to admit it, but part of me really wants to fall back into the perfect Christmas I never had. Maybe fitting into the norm. Perhaps not wanting more. Maybe there’s not much more to life than that, you know? Being surrounded by people we love, eating delicious food and getting a little bit tipsy. Maybe that’s life.

Maybe this is why our generation is obsessed with thinking that everything must be a steppingstone. They make us believe that the world is ending every five months but simultaneously every layer of reality feels beiger and more inconsequential than whatever came before. We drown in a flood of micro-trends, micro-terms, micro-viral things and micro-wins. Micro-words change their micro-meanings and girls that have a micro-moment have a whole character arc as salt-of-the-earth podcast hosts, just to get cancelled into oblivion for trying to scam their viewers with a crypto pump-and-dump scheme.
None of these words were in the Bible. What does ‘a vibe’ mean? I couldn’t tell you. Micro bed rot, rage bait, clout chase.

Our very lives feel reduced to the interpretation of the summary of a long period of time. We used to pump and dump 856 pictures taken with a digital camera into Metroflog, and now, we post five very mysterious and out-of-focus pictures with just an emoji and a month as the caption. Is this what we have become? Vibes of copies of interpretations of experiences? Micro people? Micro humans?

I want to get into the details, I want to judge, and I want to research. I want to have the data and change my opinion with newly acquired information. I don’t want to know what hyper-specific marketing jargon means. I want to be a contrarian, and also not a contrarian. And I want to really stop thinking that every single thing happening to us is something bigger.
It is not.

There’s definitely not much more to life than that: being surrounded by people we love, eating delicious food and getting a little bit tipsy. To dance, to laugh and to get our own enlightenment without hearing it on a podcast. I refuse to be defined in constrained spaces. I refuse micro anything. I refuse to be terminally online (let’s see how that one goes).

I don’t want to feel like something else might be happening. I don’t want the illusion of a turning point. I want the real thing.