[Rainbow Christmas] Tales from the Darkside's Not-So-Merry Christmas

“You look like the war on Christmas.”

My partner said this a week ago while I stood in front of our Christmas tree. Normally we only have a small tree, but this year we’re stuck in our apartment for the holidays due to the pandemic. And to try to make something good out of this traumatic year, she got a seven-foot-tall artificial white tree that she has strung with multicolored lights and cupcake ornaments.

Significantly shorter than the tree and wearing my Trick ’r Treat hoodie, I probably do look like a war on Christmas; or, as she goes on to explain, like I’m picking a fight with one of its famous symbols.

I am not a Christmas person. She is. When December rolls around, she turns into a Hallmark-ready homemaker. She decks the place out in lights and Santa hats. She turns years’ worth of cheap decorations into Instagram-worthy tableaux. Three years ago, she devoted the entire holiday to breaking down my Christmas cynicism. She makes Christmas feel like home.

As a child, she was delighted by Santa, this benevolent, gift-giving old man whom even the horrors of real-life trauma couldn’t defeat. On the other hand, I was terrified of him. This strange old man had no business spying on us kids all year, much less sneaking into our homes at night.

So Tales from the Darkside’s Christmas episode “Seasons of Belief” makes sense to us.

The episode, which originally aired in 1986 as part of the show’s third season, transforms the trope of the nuclear family gathering on Christmas Eve from a night of wonder into one  of horror. It’s Christmas Eve and two young children, Stefa and Jimbo, pester their parents about the holiday. The especially annoying Jimbo is full of snark about Christmas, joking that Santa is an alcoholic. Their parents conspire to scare them by telling the story of the antithesis to Santa: a hideous, monstrous giant called the Grither.

While Santa is (supposed to be) an embodiment of goodness and charity, the Grither’s origin story establishes him as the product of violent trauma. And whereas Santa might leave a bad child coal or skip their house altogether, the Grither straight up kills those who commit the ultimate crime: simply saying his name. The name itself acts as a homing beacon. Uttering it once draws the creature’s attention, and each subsequent utterance strengthens his awareness of where his next victim is.

Yet one can’t simply avoid the Grither by returning to silence. Once his story has begun, it must be told to completion or else he will be able to find the teller and kill them anyway. To emphasize the Grither’s ruthlessness, the parents repurpose the Christmas hymn “O Come, All Ye Faithful” for the Grither, claiming it to be what he sings in his isolated cave:

“O I am the Grither
You cannot escape me
For pleading is useless
And so are your prayers.”

Jimbo is unimpressed by the story but Stefa begs her father to finish it. At first their parents draw out the conclusion and periodically announce where the Grither is now as he flies toward their house. An ominous phone call heralds the arrival of a visitor who sings the Grither’s song. This visitor turns out to be the children’s uncle, who was informed about the prank during that phone call. The children’s  relief is short-lived, however, as high winds blow open the door and wreak havoc in the house (The highlight of this havoc is Uncle Michael’s campy performance of being blown into the next room).

At first it seems that this was indeed just a freak incident, but then the windows are shattered by the enormous, grotesque arms of the Grither himself.The Grither takes hold of each parent’s head and violently crushes it -- then, as quickly as he arrived, he withdraws, leaving the traumatized Stefa standing between her parents’ corpses in a morbid tableau of a fireside Christmas scene.

My partner and I first watched the episode together several years ago. The song had my partner nearly rolling with laughter that had to be stifled so we wouldn’t wake up my family. For days afterward, she would burst into the Grither’s song with all the mirth of a caroler.

The episode was especially relatable that first night, though, because of the evangelical environment that family visits always put us back in. “Seasons of Belief” is the perfect parody of the family Christmas movie: disbelievers, especially the snarky son, are forced to reckon with the truth of the holiday. The white, coded middle class, coded heterosexual nuclear family is a source of discomfort. The kids are annoying. There’s something off about the parents’ relationship; the elderly husband is clearly old enough to be the young wife’s father, and while relationships with significant age differences occur all the time, theirs still elicits a double-take.

The wholesome family night around the fire is awkward and antagonistic at best, accidentally revealing the absurdity of heteronormative expectations and Christmas stories that aren’t actually all that nice. Coming from a dinner hours before where distant relations lamented the abbreviation “Xmas” (even though it was perfectly fine before Fox News said it wasn’t), the forbiddenness of the Grither’s name was wildly hilarious to us.

More importantly, the episode presented violence unabashedly.  As young queer people in a deeply religious community, my partner and I both struggled to reconcile the message of love our churches purported to believe with the threat of damnation to eternal torment for stepping out of line. Home visits for the holidays were often overshadowed by a deep sense of alienation and even doom.

One of many reasons that horror movies resonated more with me than church was that they were honest about violence. They didn’t cloak it in the language of love and mercy. When Freddy Krueger told Tina his glove was God and cut her to shreds, for instance, he didn’t pretend it was to save her soul. In this regard, “Seasons of Belief” is also a comically anti-evangelical Christmas tale. The Grither isn’t coming to save anyone, nor does he care about who’s good and who’s bad. He doesn’t even want to be mentioned. The only sin that matters to him is a personal slight and once it’s been committed, there’s no way out. He doesn’t need converts or happy children sending him their wishlists. Alone in his cave, he sings his own praises.

 To the two queer kids we were back then, it was funny as hell.

 We rewatched the episode this month. My partner had forgotten about the Grither’s song and had the same reaction to it now that she had years ago. “Seasons of Belief” didn’t hit quite as hard as it once did, whether because we’re older, or because the year has been a hard one, or simply because the sound mix on my DVD is terrible. But in a year in which the usual trappings of Christmas seem all the more unreal, the Grither is still a delightfully subversive holiday figure.