By RL Selden

I’ve fought a long battle with perfectionism — I think we all have. When I write, I want the words to match some Platonic ideal of the poem or the essay that I’ve invented for myself, and it just never will. For a long time, that meant throwing away a lot of writing. It meant hating most of what I wrote. Sometimes it still means that (I’ve thrown out no less than three versions of this essay at this point). I haven’t won the battle — it’s ongoing — but I’m starting to see an end to it.

Unlike most Sufjan fans I know, my first encounter with his music was Silver & Gold. A friend recommended it when I told them I wasn’t a big Christmas music fan at a Christmas party. They told me something along the lines of “It’s not good Christmas music, it’s just good music.” On the way home, I put the album on, accidentally shuffling it, and the second or third song that came up was “Jingle Bells.” Sufjan’s version is less sleigh ride through a snowy countryside, more drunken holiday party, less Carnegie Hall, more kitchen table, and I found myself singing along to a Christmas song for the first time in years.

I paused my TV during a JCPenney Christmas ad a few days ago and really looked at what capitalism tries to sell us during the holidays. Our conception of Christmas is so driven by media that I felt I needed to take a moment to really look at what marketing executives are telling us the holiday looks like: presents wrapped so well that it looks like the paper is painted on; soft, warm lighting; a tree with evenly spaced ornaments; and people dressed in their best sweaters. The ad is pretty standard fare for a Christmas commercial — “our stuff is cheaper than other stores’ stuff” — but at the end, the tagline is “It’s what they thought that counts.” The visual language of American Christmas media teaches us what a perfect Christmas looks like, to what Jacques Lacan called the Big Other, and we spend the holidays comparing our experience to that standard, despite knowing that the standard is both unrealistic and invented. Thus, the holidays under capitalism become a pursuit of a desire that has been defined for us.

The chaos of Sufjan’s “Jingle Bells” cuts through that bullshit. Despite its seeming strangeness (the single note strumming in the beginning, the key shift from the traditional version), this rendition feels like Sufjan’s attempt at realism. The chorus of voices is slightly out of tune and out of time, encouraging us to sing along, whether we can carry a tune or not. The children laugh, and we want to, too. Sufjan invites us into his joy.

I’ll probably never stop chasing my concept of perfection in writing, and society likely will never stop selling us the perfect holiday. In fact, with social media continuing to drive cultural attitudes and ideals, American obsession with the appearance of perfection is likely to get much more intense. We’re stuck desiring what we lack, and what we lack is constantly growing as the income gap widens and wealth continues to funnel upward.

“Jingle Bells” stands as a rebuttal to this lack. It says, “Actually, we have everything we need right here,” and it’s correct.

It doesn’t need to be perfect to be beautiful.

RL Selden is a writer, educator, and coffee enthusiast. His work has appeared in Rejection Letters, Aprosexia, #Ranger, coalitionist., and elsewhere. He lives, teaches, and writes in Wilmington, NC for now.