The influencers who stole Christmas
Have Instagram and Pinterest ruined holiday decor?
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
The part of this newsletter that mentions a cat is based on true events. —Kate
I approach my writing like a sitcom: Every year there must be a Christmas episode. Two years ago, I looked back on 15 years of fighting about the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” lyrics, featuring interviews with the first bloggers who criticized it. Last year, I wrote an ode to my favorite Christmas tradition, the Jacquie Lawson virtual advent calendar. When writer Jenée Desmond-Harris recently tweeted her thoughts on trendy Christmas decor, I knew this year’s episode had fallen into my lap.
“This is an area where I can't tell the difference between the internet and real life,” she wrote in the caption a photo of a decadent Christmas tree, covered in frosty white and silver ornaments. “Does everyone's Christmas tree look like this now or do people still have the ones with colored lights and mismatched ornaments? I can't even find a picture of the old kind anywhere!”
The replies confirmed her suspicions: “Pinterest and influencers have made Christmas chaos extinct but it lives on [in] my house,” writer and podcaster Caroline Moss replied.
It’s true. The first result upon searching “Christmas tree” on Pinterest is an entire category called “glam.” When you click it, you’re met with this:
Even if you steer clear from that ice-cold tundra, you’re still met with meticulously crafted decor, all positioned and matched as if it were a thousand-dollar art installation.
Christmas chaos is something different. It’s the 1992 book I Spy Christmas. It’s clustering all the glass ornaments at the top of the tree to keep them out of reach of the cat. It’s the ugliest ornament you’ve ever seen that you still have to put on the tree each year because your sister made it when she was seven. Despite the word “chaos,” it’s not whatever this is:
The pristine and elaborate genre of Christmas decor that currently dominates is almost certainly thanks to Instagram, and the growing belief that every aspect of our lives should be lived with public consumption in mind. Samantha Ulasy, founder of Margaret Valley Landscaping, told me that she’s seen it most in the past four years.
“Because social media is the way of life now, I think people are seeing it more and wanting to create their own,” she told me last year, talking about front porch decor, which she designs for influencers like Jillian Harris and The Birds Papaya. “There's such a bigger audience now.”
But by definition, you can’t hire a professional if you want to bring back Christmas chaos. The unpolished, mismatched, even awkward look of the increasingly nostalgic genre of decor is the point. By writing this article, I’m already thinking about it too much.