By Grace Robins-Somerville

Sometime early in my teen years, I began to bristle against many of the things I’d found joy and comfort in as a child. December no longer brought me a sense of familial warmth; instead, I associated it with shorter, darker days, school finals, and familial stress. While coming home from school in December and hearing the local Christmas radio station blasting through the house used to fill me with the warm glow of good things to come, as I got older, I found their programming unbearably saccharine. My teen angst and newfound seasonal affective disorder had turned me from an adorable, wide-eyed Cindy Lou Who to a pubescent Grinch.

Around this time, one of my favorite bands was Bright Eyes. I’d played their Christmas album for my family, who deemed it too depressing to count as a compromise between their holiday cheer and my desire to wallow in clichéd sulkiness. It was through Bright Eyes’ A Christmas Album that I found the Christmas albums of Sufjan Stevens. I was a casual Sufjan fan at the time, but his hushed vocals and folksy arrangements of Christmas classics (and some originals) were enough to satiate my winter melancholy. As much as I loved the downright dreariness of tracks like “Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)” and “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!,” Sufjan’s sillier offerings could somehow momentarily snap me out of my funk. As much as it felt like the ending of some mid-budget Christmas comedy—me, the surly, eye-rolling teen who’d rediscovered the true spirit of Christmas—I couldn’t help but get swept up in all its goofy earnestness.

People have asked me which Sufjan song I’d be writing about for this advent calendar, and I can’t say “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” with a straight face. With a song this catchy and cartoonish, you’re not supposed to. Even in my Grinchiest moments, the gallop of bells, piano plinking, and banjo rattling never fails to shake the winter blues away. Its lyrics are a disjointed Mad Libs of Christmas-related imagery: mistletoe! Jesus and Mary! Elves — 21 of them to be exact! Towards the end, an interpolation of “Away In A Manger” winds itself around the chorus like tinsel, in a sort of Santa-Jesus duet.

To this day, “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” is my antidote for when the holiday season feels more stressful than fun or when the diminishing daylight makes me feel less than celebratory. It feels like coming inside from the cold, having followed the glow of the indoors through the winter night from all the way down the street.

“There’s a lot to shout about” — and everything is shouted with equal intensity. Why are we celebrating the fact that both the bakery and the K-Mart are closed? Or that your sister cut her own bangs? Who knows? But it feels good to get swept up in all of it, to let the ordinary seem magical by association.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.