Every December, just about the time the plastic skeletons are consigned to the trash, and the Styrofoam snow is dragged from the attic, something feels off in my brain. It has nothing to do with the cold or the darkness, but with the racket. The inbox deluge, the push notifications, the steady, relentless undertone of BUY BUY BUY vibrating under every word. Holiday discounts, flash sales, doorbusters, last calls, the whole thing masquerading as cheer and generosity. After a while, it stops sounding inviting and starts sounding like a threat. Like, Nice family you got there, would they know you loved them if they didn't all get matching pajamas?

The same question repeats over and over in my head: If the United States has a de facto religion, the god is not loving, or wise, or mysterious. The god is money. We wake up to feed it. Alarm buzzes, and we trudge to work or log in bleary-eyed and exchange pieces of our lives so some number in some computer halfway across the country can twitch a little in a direction someone likes. December comes, and that same system peers down at us and says, Okay, now spend. Show you love people. Show you are okay. Show you belong. The holidays can feel more like an annual blood sacrifice with wrapping paper and bows.

In my head, this takes the form of folk horror. The town square is a mall or a homepage. The altar is a checkout screen. The priests are bankers and executives and very serene people on the news who calmly explain consumer confidence while half the country panics over whether rent and presents can share a calendar month. We deck the halls, we put up lights, we wait in lines, we refresh tracking numbers like we are divining omens. Everyone cracks jokes about being broke. Everyone shrugs and keeps pushing forward. There are no cloaks or torches, just fluorescent lighting, shipping labels, and a holiday playlist looping the same twelve songs until your brain feels like a Hallmark movie that will soon burst from your skull.

If I buy this for my child, which bill do I push into jeopardy? How much credit left on that card? What left for food if I empty this cart? You are told to be present, to be grateful, to drink it all in, but your brain is running cold calculations in the background like a haunted calculator. Nothing like trying to feel cozy while also calculating how to survive the January blues.

To be fair, it is not all poison. Gift-giving can be beautiful. Getting the right thing for the right person and watching their face light up can be as real and human a gesture as anything, not automatically cursed just because Amazon takes a percentage. Millions of people working retail, in warehouses, deliveries, kitchens, bars, and other industries are depending on these weeks. They need the tips, the overtime, the seasonal bump just to tread water. None of them is the villain in this horror movie. Most of them are the ones actually holding the season together while everyone else is posting tree photos. The machine may be ugly, but human moments are occurring inside it.

Still, the system that hovers over this has its own logic and that is where it starts to feel monstrous. It always wants more. More spending, more growth, more profit, more this year than last. The holidays are just one more lever to pull. Anxiety is wrapped in tinsel and sold as magic. If you let your guard down, you may wake up on December 26th feeling like you have celebrated nothing. You may feel chewed on for a month and spat out lighter with your bank account in some stranger's hands. 

Romero gave us a mall of the undead as a satire. Lately, it feels like satire has prevailed. Sales signs stack on top of one another until the walls resemble a ransom note. People film their hauls and turn their stress and debt into content, hoping the algorithm might reward them for suffering in 4K. Your private panic becomes a performance. The god at the center of all this does not care whether you are joyful or miserable, just whether the line on a graph keeps creeping up. The real Christmas spirit is the quarterly growth rate, which is darkly funny if you stand back far enough.

I am not pretending to be some ethereal observer of this. I still buy things. I still get caught up in the same anxiety riptide. I still do the haunted math at 1 a.m. staring at my banking app with that little pit in my stomach. I like surprising people. I like seeing my kids or friends open something that makes them feel seen. I am not trying to sermonize from any moral high ground. I am right in the same mess. I am just calling it by it's name.

What would this time of year look like if the primary thing we had to offer one another was not money we don't really have, but time we keep being told we don't have? Time to sit with our kids without doomscrolling. Time to watch trashy horror with someone we love, no productivity allowed. Time to just exist in the same room without worrying if it could make good content. If the god we were feeding each other was our neighbors instead of finance, how different would December feel?

My guess is it would look smaller on the outside. Less Hollywood. Fewer boxes under the tree, fewer flex posts, fewer I-made-this look-how-perfect-this-is shots for the grid. It would probably be more awkward and a little boring sometimes, because real time with real people is never as smooth as an advertisement. But maybe you would not feel so hollow when the decorations come down. Maybe the hangover would be emotional in a positive way, rather than financial in a terrifying way.

Right now, it feels like a lovely, almost cult-like ceremony. The colors are great. The songs are familiar. There are honest, tender moments buried in there, and I do not want to throw those out. I just do not want to forget there is something behind it, tallying up and caring not about your joy, only your spending. Call it whatever you want. A God, a monster, the market. Either way, it needs to be worshiped.

If I get to choose, I would rather light a cheap candle, put on some gnarly horror, sit with the people I love and remember the only thing I actually want more of is them. The god of finance will be there in January still hungry, still emailing. Let it go hungry for one night. It has devoured enough already.