I asked my wife, who is a sucker for anything Christmas, to identify the capital of American Christmas, based on the images she sees on TV. She said it was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She’s right; there is even a Christmas card for sale of a Norman Rockwell painting of downtown Stockbridge. I almost bought it this year, but I didn’t.
I grew up in a town in Ohio that looked a lot like Stockbridge, so all of those images of snow, large colonial homes, and happy, affluent white people inevitably resonate with me. Most Americans have never lived in a place like that, however. Why do they relate so strongly to those images?
Unfortunately, the answer is fairly obvious: at an unconscious level, we accept the notion of white suburban America as the real America. The Christmas commercials and the Hallmark movies are telling us what we want to hear. That’s the reactionary position, and we need to resist it.