By Malcolm Ilnicky

Christmas has always felt like an escape hatch cracked open in the roof of the calendar year. Just when I’m starting to feel worn down by routine and responsibilities, it calls out to me through familiar songs, endlessly rewatched movies, and an avalanche of nostalgia-coated advertising. For a few weeks every year, the holiday beckons me to push through the hatch and get lost all over again in festivity and merriment. We collectively refer to this as “the Christmas Spirit,” and sometimes the best way to get into it is by getting away from everything else.

When I was young, it was easy to be taken by the enchantment of the holiday. Christmas felt more like something that happened to me than something I actively participated in. I was simply carried along, buckled into the backseat, and ushered through department stores shimmering under fluorescent light. My half-forgotten memories of Christmases past feel as eclectic and disjointed as my dad’s Christmas CD collection. James Brown’s Funky Christmas takes me home; We Three Kings by the Roches transports me to a wreath-making workshop with Mom; Dr. Demento’s Christmas compilation lands me outside the Home Depot where we rang Salvation Army donation bells with Uncle Kelvin, who was neither an uncle nor a Kelvin.

Christmas inevitably lost some of its magic when I discovered that [CONTENT WARNING] Santa was my parents. As I grew up, the responsibility shifted. The magic no longer arrived on its own — I had to go looking for it. I learned that you can’t move through December the same way you moved through the other 11 months and then wonder why nothing changed. “It just doesn’t feel like Christmas this year” can really just mean “no one strung my house with lights and fed me hot chocolate with marshmallows.” Christmas gives back what you put into it. It resists routine and challenges us to find an escape.

This is the quiet thesis at the heart of “We’re Goin’ to the Country!” It’s a song about searching for something you can’t find in the rhythms of everyday life. It’s a song about leaving, so much so that Sufjan himself appears to have departed almost entirely from the track, passing lead vocals off to Matthew Morgan instead. Sufjan’s already delicate voice dissolves into the background as a banjo leads the way, electric guitar following behind like a tired companion. Together, they drive the listener down a road that feels both intimate and uncharted.

Where most travel-based Christmas songs romanticize the magic of coming home, “We’re Goin’ to the Country!” gestures toward the opposite. The repeated mantra, borrowed from the title of the song, seems to be more about a symbolic refuge than a specific place. We know what they’re after, so does the destination even matter? Thus “the country” becomes kind of an abstract: a state of mind, a rural landscape, or just a “somewhere else” onto which we can project our own longing.

The verses of the song further emphasize a deviation from the norm. Making a Christmas bed, finding a tree to put in your house, and adorning your mother’s blouse with mistletoe. These are not your everyday activities. They represent a handful of the small but heavily symbolic traditions that go into making Christmas the most wonderful time of the year. In Sufjan’s humble vision of the holiday, this is what “goin’ to the country” is all about.

As millions pour into New York City every December in search of the Christmas Spirit, I’ve learned that I prefer to step out. My take on “goin’ to the country” is a rather literal one. Since moving to the city five years ago, I’ve made an almost yearly December pilgrimage up the scenic Taconic State Parkway to the small town of Rhinebeck. I take shelter in the Beekman Arms, which has been providing comfort to wayward travelers since the early 1700s.

I’m aware my affection for the inn might be biased. When I’m not pretending to be a writer, I work on historic buildings for a living, and I recognize that the Beekman’s charm won’t land for everyone. The Victorian furnishings and loud wallpapers can read as outdated; the low ceilings and uneven floors, claustrophobic. Still, the place holds a warmth that can only come from centuries of conversation, laughter, and cheer baked into its wood-panelled walls. When the cold settles in on a late December night, there’s no place I’d rather be. Besides, they must be doing something right to last 300 years!

The Beekman Arms lives in my memory like one of those “Cozy Christmas Ambience” videos that you might find playing on the host’s TV in the background of a holiday house party. You know, the ones where the fire never stops crackling, and the snow never stops falling. It’s Christmas every day there. And it’s Christmas every day in Rhinebeck, because I only know Rhinebeck during Christmastime. It’s where I take myself, both physically and mentally, when the spirit can’t find me where I am. Oh, did I mention that on our most recent trip to the Beekman, we happened into a bright red rental car and forest green bedroom?

If you’re struggling to locate the Christmas Spirit this year, try thinking about where “goin’ to the country” takes you. Maybe it’s the middle of Times Square, where nighttime can’t reach you behind the glow of the billboards. Maybe it’s a vast, untouched landscape, where the snow makes the outdoors feel like a room. Or maybe it's no place at all, but rather a feeling you allow yourself to step into, if only for a moment.

Wherever your country may be, go there, find peace, and may the Christmas Spirit catch up to you when you arrive.

Malcolm Ilnicky is an architectural designer and radio disc jockey based in Brooklyn. His New Year’s resolution is to write more. Follow him on Instagram (@malcolm_ilnicky) to see if he follows through with it!