A Very Sufjan Christmas is Back For Another Year!

The following is a post from our sister site A Very Sufjan Christmas.
Follow us on Twitter at @SufjanChristmas or on Instagram at @SufjanChristmas to enjoy daily song write-ups this December!

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I’m not going to sugar-coat it, this year has been rough. So much so that I debated whether or not I even wanted to do A Very Sufjan Christmas this year. After all, how much do you feel like celebrating? Because I certainly don’t. 

Between the ongoing global pandemic, a demoralizing election cycle, and a fascist government that’s systematically brutalizing and murdering its own citizens, most days it feels like there isn’t much to look forward to. That said, time is indifferent and marches onward regardless of how we feel or what we think. Once the leaves began to change this fall and December crept over the horizon of my calendar I realized we could use some holiday cheer this year more than ever.

I’m going to level with you guys, running this blog is a lot of work. Even though I’m not personally writing every post, I’m still just one man wrangling 25 writers, editing 25 pieces, publishing 25 articles, and scheduling 25 days of social media. This is all on top of my day job and my other music blog over at Swim Into The Sound. 

I say this not to earn pity points, but because I know every one of you reading this is probably in a similar position. You might be better off than me, hell you might be worse off than me, but we’re all living through the same thing, and it brings me great joy to see how much cheer this blog spreads each year. 

That sense of tangible holiday cheer is worth all the countless hours and late nights I spend throughout these last two months of the year. I get to revel in the stories of other people’s Christmases past and help share them with the world. They’re not always wholesome, but neither is life. Either way, I love being at the epicenter of this communal outpouring of Christmas spirit. The fact that it’s themed around an artist I love is just a bonus. 

Speaking of which, 2020 has been a banner year for Sufjan. We received not only the first studio album of his in five years, but a groovy electronic record on top of that. If you’re still hungry for more Sufjan-related content to tide you over till December, I published a retrospective on Carrie & Lowell earlier this year that I’m quite proud of. 

Personal plugs, Sufjan-related updates, and global temperature checks aside, I hope you’re all doing okay. This blog will run on the same schedule as years past; starting December 1st, you’ll see a new post from a different writer every day until Christmas. I encourage you to bookmark this page, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and even reddit to keep up with the posts. You can also visit the archive to read the previous year’s posts if you’re already feeling the Christmas spirit. 

If you’re interested in participating in the blog this year or next, please reach out to us on any of those platforms linked above or via our email sufjanchristmas@gmail.com.  

Other than that, all I can ask is that you share this website with someone you think you might enjoy it. If you find an article that really connects with you, share it, text someone about it, post it on your story, that means the world. Even reach out to the writer, each author’s social media accounts are (almost always) linked at the bottom of each write-up, and there’s nothing quite like random words of affirmation from a stranger, especially around the holidays. 
With all that said, I hope you are all doing okay. I love you all, and I’m beyond excited to share another 25 fantastic write-ups with you this year. 

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, stay safe. 

A Very Sufjan Christmas is Back

The following is a post from our sister site A Very Sufjan Christmas.
Follow us at @SufjanChristmas on Twitter or @SufjanChristmas on Instagram to enjoy daily song write-ups this December!

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It’s finally November, and that can only mean one thing: Sufjan Season is officially upon us!

This winter, A Very Sufjan Christmas will be returning for another post each day from December first until Christmas Day. It’s going to be the same drill as last year; every post will be penned by a different author who will be discussing a different Sufjan Christmas song. 

There will be sad posts, happy posts, nostalgic posts, long-winded posts, artful posts, and everything in between. Our contributors range from musicians, teachers, producers, and above all else, Sufjan fans. It brings me great honor to be able to share their Christmas spirit with you, and I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading these write-ups as much as I’ve enjoyed organizing them.

We’ve made the site super easy to keep up with. Each new write-up is uploaded directly to our home page (www.sufjanchristmas.com), so you can simply bookmark that URL (maybe even make it your homepage) and then visit it each day of December for a fantastic new write-up!

You can also follow us on Twitter at @SufjanChristmas, on Instagram at @SufjanChristmas, or even on reddit at /u/SufjanChristmas where we’ll be posting daily discussions of each article over at the /r/Sufjan subreddit.

If you’re just too excited to wait for December, you can always read back through last year’s posts here, or browse some of our supplemental reading material for additional Sufjan Christmassy goodness. 

No matter what your holiday looks like, whether you’re spending it alone, with friends, family, loved ones, or pets, we consider ourselves lucky to be even a small part of it. Whether you’re going to be in church, flying back home, or fighting your way through a shopping mall, we hope that this site will provide a small respite from the Christmas Chaos this December. As tiring and hectic as this time of the year may be, we hope that this site will serve as a reminder of the good that the holidays can bring. We hope that this communal showing of Christmas spirit helps you make it to the end of the year, or at the very least, will give you something to read as you avoid weird family members or find yourself stuck in line at the mall.

Once again, I am astonished not only by people’s willingness to contribute to this site and share their stories, but the fact that other people take their time to read what’s posted here warms my heart and fuels my Christmas spirit. I think I speak for everyone on the team when I say that you readers mean the world to us, so thank you in advance for a fantastic holiday season. We’ll see you all in December when our first write-up goes live.

Until then, Peace, Love, and Christmas Trees. 
Love, Taylor and the rest of the A Very Sufjan Christmas Staff.

A Very Sufjan Christmas

The following is a welcome post from our sister site A Very Sufjan Christmas. Follow us at @SufjanChristmas on Twitter or @SufjanChristmas on Instagram to enjoy daily song write-ups this December!

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The holidays are our greatest gift. Regardless of surface-level differences in how we celebrate this time of year, the one thing we all share is tradition. It doesn’t matter if you observe Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or nothing at all, every one of us have rituals we use to get us through the winter. It’s the coldest, darkest, most inhospitable time of the year, and that’s easier to get through when we’re closer to other people, both physically and psychologically. Tradition is survival. Tradition is human.

That is the true meaning of Christmas. 

Not presents.
Or Santa Claus.
Or even Jesus.

Christmas represents universal tradition. A communal coping mechanism evolved on a species-wide level for the purpose of survival on both a physical and spiritual level. Over time, Christmas has been twisted to mean hundreds of different things. The truth is Christmas is what you make of it, and that’s what makes it the greatest holiday in the world. 

While Christmas has endured in the pop-cultural landscape for far less time than the holiday itself, it has still been around long enough for millions of different traditions to develop. From Coca-Cola popularizing Santa Claus to Montgomery Ward’s creation of Rudolph, there are a seemingly infinite number of touchstones that we share as a culture. Movies, TV, music, food, smells, shapes, and symbols all seep into our head from a young age, giving us a complicated, tangled web of connections and bonds to this complicated and tangled time of year. 

Oppositely, there are just as many individual traditions that we carry out on a much smaller scale. Whether it’s watching A Christmas Story with your family or making the same cookies every year with your roommates, there are both universal celebrations and personal ones. Among this delicate balancing act of traditions, vacations, gifts, and rushing around it’s important to slow down and have a personal escape during this hyper-communal time of year. For many people, one of the newest additions to this Personal Christmas Canon is Sufjan Stevens’ holiday music. 

While you may recognize him from his contributions to 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, Sufjan has been creating soul-affirming and critically-acclaimed folk music for nearly two decades. Aside from landmark artistic creations like Illinois, Age of Adz, and Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan has also displayed his personal devotion to the holidays with a catalog of two multi-hour Christmas compilations. 

Religion, Christianity, and family have been a constant throughline of Sufjan’s discography, so the Christmas holiday proved to be both a fascination for Sufjan as well as a synthesis of all these themes. Releasing one EP a year from 2001 to 2011, Sufjan has birthed to exactly 100 Christmas songs over the course of one decade. Some original, some covers, some standards, each entry is lovingly-crafted and amounts to more than 4.5 hours of Christmas spirit. These songs are collected on Songs For Christmas and Silver and Gold, two releases that have warmed the hearts of indie fans and Christmas lovers alike. 

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A Very Sufjan Christmas is a blog dedicated to every one of these songs. Much like we all celebrate the holiday season in our special way, every listener has a unique connection with Sufjan’s extensive body of Christmas-based work. As such, each post on this website will tackle one specific Sufjan Christmas song from a different writer’s perspective as we countdown the days till Christmas. Maybe they’ll talk about their experience with Sufjan, or their memories attached to that one song. Maybe they’ll just write about the music itself. 

These songs are a window into the traditions and lives of the writer. There are few albums that have opened this many spiritual doors for this many people, and that’s why these songs must be celebrated. These are the soundtracks to Christmases past and the inner lives of music fans the world over.

You’ll quickly find that each song is a beautiful work worthy of its own celebration. Whether this is your first experience with Sufjan, or you are a long-time fan, we hope you find as much connection, warmth, and joy in these songs as we did when we first heard them. We hope you connect with these stories and that they allow you to reflect on your own traditions and those of your family. Most of all, we hope you enjoy the music and we wish you a very Sufjan Christmas this year. 

Welcome to our Winter Wonderland. 

Love, Kyle, Taylor, and the rest of the A Very Sufjan Christmas Staff.

Traditions and Nostalgia

If nothing else, I’m a nostalgic person. I played through the entire Mass Effect series over the course of several whirlwind months a few years back, and one of the things that stuck with me the most, out of the hundreds of hours of gameplay, was a single conversation with one of the characters. The character, Thane, was a member of an alien race who had the ability to relive any moment of his life with perfect clarity. I remember watching this scene and genuinely thinking ‘that would be pretty cool’ until the character continued talking and convinced me otherwise. I find it worrying that “cool!” was my initial reaction to what is ultimately a curse.

I catch myself waxing poetic things that happened mere months ago. And it’s not a ‘aw, wasn’t that nice?’ kind of feeling, it’s more of a crippling ‘I WANT TO GO BACK’ kind of feeling. I’m 23, and I don’t feel like I should be that nostalgic over something that happened a couple months ago. To make things worse, this nostalgia compounds on itself and becomes more powerful as the events become further and further away. The plus side to this is that I am often the centerpiece of my own nostalgic tendencies. That sounds incredibly absorbed and self-centered, but it’s actually just a side-effect of how much I love to be alone.

Because the feeling can be so overpowering, I prefer to think of my nostalgia trips as self-imposed traditions. Whether you like it or not, everyone has tradition forced upon them. Every Christmas we collectively experience the same traditions as a society. The same music is being played in the stores, the same specials are being aired on TV, and even the fronts of buildings change to reflect the candy cane color scheme. Hell, we spend time, money, and natural resources wrapping our trees in little lights just because it’s a specific month. Christmas is the only time we collectively change our environment, and more importantly, these changes are all completely out of our control. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Wiccan, or a Scientologist, you’re gonna hear those tunes over the course of those two months whether you like it or not. And this isn’t some “war on Christmas” rant, the point is sometimes seasons carry traditions which overpower everything else around them.

Sometimes traditions don’t make sense, but we do them because they make us feel good. As Community pointed out in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” Christmas isn’t about presents, or food, or even Jesus: Christmas is about family. Christmas is about literally and figuratively getting closer to your family and using them as support to get through the coldest, darkest, harshest time of the year. Christmas isn’t for Christians, Christmas is symbolic: it’s is about what your family does. Now, what your family does may entail presents, food, or Jesus, but in the end, it’s human connection that carries us through what would otherwise be the most unforgiving season of the year.

Because I spend so much time alone, music is often the key element to my own nostalgia. My iTunes contains a worrying number of playlists tied to specific years, seasons, and even days. As a 23-year-old I’m accustomed to viewing life in school-like quarters (I guess normal people call them seasons?), and the changing of the seasons always comes with a new rotation of music on my iPhone. I feel like that’s relatively normal, but the problem is that I often reinforce my own nostalgia by recreating the circumstances the following year.

I’ll waste dozens of hours listening to a specific podcast, revisiting a specific album, or even playing through an entire video game just because it brings back a fraction of what I had felt at a previous time. Why am I so obsessed with recreating the past? It’s not like I have any regrets. I’m not trying to make things better, or take back what I’ve done… It just feels good.

I don’t think nostalgia trips are necessarily a bad thing, but I worry that this zealot-like commitment to recreating the past may be holding me back from missing opportunities in the present. 2016 has been the best year of my life, and I owe that entirely to the new experiences I’ve had this year. The people I’ve meet, the things I’ve done, all the amazing things I never thought I’d be a part of… See? I’m already getting nostalgic about a year that’s not even over yet. The point is I’ve had a great year, and I owe it all to trying something new. There’s something to be said from learning from the past, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with revisiting your personal history, but I suppose it’s all a matter of not falling into it completely.

Over the next several months I’m sure I’ll make specific posts dedicated to individual pieces of my nostalgia, and I’m starting to realize that’s the point of this blog. I think if I can document this all somewhere I’ll be able to get these nostalgic demons off my chest and move on to bigger, better, and newer things. There’s so much beauty in the world, and I just want to share some of what I’ve found. Sometimes it’s as simple as a week over winter break that I spent shut in with a video game. Sometimes it’s an album whose opening chords are so powerful that I can’t help but be transported back to a specific time and place. Even if no one is reading this, I think it will be a great exercise to document my personal traditions and show how these things far in the past still impact me to this very day.

I feel like these personal traditions, the things you do by yourself, aren’t something people talk about openly a lot. But they’re important. I believe personal traditions are some of the most unadulterated experiences we have as humans, something that shows who we are and what we find important. We’re all a collection of favorite albums, this is just mine.