For many of us, the holiday season means making joyous memories with your loved ones, exchanging gifts, and transforming your home into a winter wonderland. For others, it means briefly reverting to your neurotic teenage self and making bad decisions during a week in your hometown. For Melania Trump, however, the holiday season means something different, something darker. As the classic song goes:
Oh the weather outside is frightful / and inside, it’s also frightful / and since we’ve no place to go, feel woe, feel woe, feel woe!
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As her chief of staff Stephanie Grisham noted, the first lady “is seeing to every last detail” of the White House’s Christmas decorations, apparently to ensure maximal darkness and despair. After all, it is literally the darkest part of the year, the months when the cold’s bitter embrace feels inescapable, when the last dead leaf has fallen from the trees, and we are most alone.
This year the first lady has decked the halls of the White House to match her haunted heart, presumably in anticipation of her annual holiday tradition—shattering the faces of her porcelain doll collection to release the souls of forgotten children she has spent all year collecting.
For Melania, Christmastime is goth, and I am 100 percent here for it.
“The President, Barron, and I are very excited for our first Christmas in the White House,” the first lady hissed in a press release Monday. “As with many families across the country, holiday traditions are very important to us. I hope when visiting the People’s House this year, visitors will get a sense of being home for the holidays.” I wish being home for the holidays meant solemnly surveying an army of Christmas ballerinas to ensure the mood remains grim as my doomed soul. Because that’s what it means for Melania:
Now, you might be inclined to believe that Melania’s Christmas darkness can be chalked up to her perceived discontent with being the wife of the president. (“She didn’t want this come hell or high water. I don’t think she thought it was going to happen,” a longtime friend of the Trump family recently told Vanity Fair.) But let’s not project emotions on Melania. As her tweets from past years illustrate, her Christmases have always been dark. After all, being goth isn’t a phase, it’s a way of life.
So as we take up arms in the annual War on Christmas, take a page from the first lady’s book, and make your holiday season as dark as the past year has been. In the immortal words of Blink-182, “We’ll have Halloween on Christmas, and in the night we’ll wish this never ends.”
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