By Sean Swenson

After my mom died, I couldn’t listen to music for about three months because I was terrified of crying. I’d had my One Big Cry at her deathbed while my dad was in the cafeteria. After that, I kept a stiff upper lip, through the funeral and endless condolences and painful arguments and family therapy that followed. It’s not that I didn’t want to cry; it’s that I thought that if I started to cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop. Even worse, if my dad saw me crying, he would start to cry too, and then we would both drown, each of us incapable of comforting the other. I would avoid grocery stores and chain restaurants for fear of stepping on an emotional landmine triggered by something as dumb as “Our House” by Madness.

Christmas music was completely off the table as well — Sufjan Christmas, especially. My mom loved Sufjan (her music taste was the perfect balance of hipster art-rock and yuppie easy-listening; this may have been why I was unnaturally depressed as a child). Illinois soundtracked endless car rides of my childhood, and the Songs for Christmas box set was our default dinner music through December. She died in August, so we were still in no state to “do the holidays” — it didn’t feel right anyway. It was my mom who cared the most about all of the rituals. There was no one to remind us to get out the tinsel tree and kitschy ornaments, make latkes for Hanukkah, or watch the godawful Santa Claus episode of MST3K. Instead, my dad and I went to Palm Springs, took psilocybin, and watched Life of Brian, which, in its own dysfunctional way, was enough. Not long after that, I decided to go back to school, then to New York. Now Christmas is something I feel ambient dread over — the uprooting of my routine, the budgeting for gifts and travel, the return to my teenage bedroom, the sense that I have abandoned the place and the people who raised me.

This is all to say that I put on “Christmas in July” this morning while editing this piece and immediately burst into tears. I’ve been in somatic therapy for about a year now, slowly learning how to feel things in my body, including relearning how to let myself cry. Songs are still triggering, but the emotions aren’t scary anymore. To have a private relationship with a song I’ve listened to hundreds of times feels like a blessing instead of a trap.

To be fair, “Christmas in July” is a song of emotional dysregulation, right from the lilting strings in the intro. There is a sense that the world is slightly off-kilter, that we’re almost unstuck in time. It’s Christmas and July. We shift, with balletic precision, from hopeful march to manic waltz to a plaintive cry. According to this SongMeanings commenter, it changes time signatures eleven times, which is crazy even for Sufjan.

At first, I thought this song was from the perspective of someone who has left their home, the familiarity of their own rituals, and the profoundly mismatched feelings that ensue. Now I think it’s sung by the person who got left behind:

And I love my friends, even if they fight
Christmas in July, just to keep them quiet
And I love you too, I love you through the night
But now that you're away, Christmas isn't right.

I think it’s also about how, as an adult, the closest you get to the sugar rush of Christmas joy is much more likely to happen in late July, drinking lukewarm champagne at the beach, on vacations with the family you’ve chosen rather than the one you are obliged to. Not that obligation is necessarily bad — it has just taken on a different importance. Christmas in Texas has its own delightfully bizarro qualities: green lawns and 70-degree weather, tamales and pedal steel covers of “Rudolph.” It feels more honest, in a way. I hope that you can cry freely this Christmas. I hope the Earth feels slightly askew from its axis. Open the champagne and feel the winter sun on your back. I think this is what it means to be an adult — to feel a little bit broken but all the better for it.

Sean is a playwright & performer from Austin, TX. They have a few exciting things happening in 2026 that they technically can’t announce yet, and live in Brooklyn with two cats. [seanworldnomercy.com]