Dear 1990s Christmas,
We miss you and all your glory.
Picture it: it’s the last day before holiday break. Your mom shows up to your class party wearing some kind of Christmas bear sweater that was ironed on and outlined in puffy paint while you’re wearing a homemade Christmas bow bought from a craft fair in Mississippi. Your classmates are eating your candy-cane reindeer with two brown pipe cleaners twisted into antlers. Everyone just finished writing their list to Santa in gel pens and it included Beanie Babies, boombox, Tamagotchi, and maybe a Super Nintendo if you were really good this year. Then the bell rings and everyone jumps into your friend’s mom’s car blaring Mariah Carey’s first holiday CD because you’ve just been handed a glorious 14 days of freedom.
Life. Was. Good.
But now the scene looks a little different. Moms are usually decked out in a precious boutique sweater, and chances are she has six more at home because there are approximately 957 variations of Christmas events she needs to be dressed for. The party food is no longer candy-cane reindeer and homemade cookies. It’s one Pinterest masterpiece after another, perfectly arranged on a plate with a cute tag and a funny holiday pun. Sure the kids can still go home with a friend, but the time together is usually cut short because someone has to get to Christmas in the Oaks, a cookie-decorating party, a tacky sweater soirée, or possibly all of the above. The music is now cued up to some very specific Spotify Christmas playlist. The Christmas lists barely have any toys. Now it’s cell phones, Lululemon, Xboxes, iPads, Starbucks gift cards, and beauty products I don’t even buy for myself.
It’s no accident people are gravitating back to that “Ralph Lauren Christmas” as this year’s holiday aesthetic. You know the vibe: cozy reds and plaids, rustic, velvet bows, wood fires, corduroys, and collared shirts layered under knit sweaters. For us millennials, the look and feel remind us of a simpler time before the overwhelming number of events, presents, outfits, and activities started taking over. 
It’s not that I don’t enjoy all of today’s pageantry and excitement because I absolutely do. It’s such a fun time of year to get dressed up, go to parties, try new restaurants, and visit with people we love. However, when I looked at my family’s calendar, there isn’t a single Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night in all of December that we have free. So I had to intentionally carve out a spot on the calendar for a night where we make s’mores, watch a classic holiday movie, and drive around to look at Christmas lights in the neighborhood. Not the big fancy light displays in the parks, just the old-fashioned decorations on people’s houses like we used to do back in the day.
I doubt society will ever go back to a slower, simpler pace where the biggest worry was going store to store trying to find that beloved gift because online shopping wasn’t even a thing. Nor do I think people will suddenly start sending out more physical Christmas cards instead of digital cards coming through as Facebook posts. But I am going to hold on to those nostalgic 1990s Christmas ideologies for as long as I can and weave them into my own kids’ lives.
So thanks for the holiday mems, ’90s. We didn’t know how good we had it. But maybe in 30 years, someone will be writing about how they want to bring back the Christmas of the 2020s?
