The Christmas season is a sort of measuring stick. T. Greer says:
What is good in bourgeois civilization is concentrated in this season of beauty and merriment. Against this bar all creeds, all claimed paths to excellence, all cults of eudaimonia, may be measured. Against this bar most are found wanting.
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It is silly and sentimental, a thoroughly domesticated holiday, in practice a celebration of the most bourgeois aspects of life: private happiness, familial bliss, childhood as a privileged category, contentment derived from creature comforts, joy derived from things given and received, and charity as the guiding virtue—but charity practiced soul-to-soul, not at the level of society as a whole. It is not a holiday that celebrates justice, nor greatness, nor ambition; it is mirthful but never Dionysian; it is faithful but never austere. It sits uneasy with the ethos of the conqueror; it fits no better in the theorizing of the philosopher. No Greek nor Roman, no crusader nor hermit, no revolutionary, no terrorist, no underground man can smile sound on this Victorian relic.
This holiday does not idolize excellence. It gives equally to the old, the poor, and the ugly. It does not ask for supreme sacrifices. It does challenge those who celebrate it to recognize the supreme sacrifice of another—but to recognize this sacrifice in an everyday way, through modest and moderate acts of goodwill. It is a celebration well made for the temperate. It defines success as sitting around a warm fireplace, kids in tow. It draws meaning from nostalgia and merriment, in small rituals and small acts of kindness. Christmas is a bundle of unapologetically mawkish sensibilities gone wild—and despite all of that, it is good.
I am aware that the Christmas I describe is not universal. I describe a tradition whose practices emerged in the mid-1800s, and that have lasted, with an aesthetic tweak there or a practical change there, down to the present. It embodies the virtues of its origins: it is a holiday for the shopkeepers, birthed by the Victorian marriage of Christian sentiments and Enlightenment sensibilities. From that moment arose a set of traditions and convictions that are modest, beautiful, and good. They are small. They are simple. But from these small and simple things great ones may be judged.