Pop Culture Princess // The Last Christmas... Ever
requesting advice re: saving me from further tears
Welcome to Pop Culture Princess, the version of this letter that appears at (or near…) the Last Quarter of each moon cycle, where Addison tugs at a piece of her pop culture brain lint and makes you look at it too.
🎶 Last Christmas I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special 🎶
I’ve been walking around humming this melody for days, filling in my own mean lyrics about myself and my lack of inherent value while I do literally anything other than the one thing I’m always desperately scrounging for time to do: write.
Laaaast weekend, I said I would write
but the very next day, I wasted away.
Thiiiis week, to save me from bleak,
I’ll bully my brain with angry internal self-talk until something appears in somebody’s inbox like three days late in the middle of the night <3
What can I say? I’m pretty hella oofin’ depressed right now! It’s realllllly hard to do very basic things, things that are necessary in order to be considered ‘functioning’ and ‘hygenic’ and ‘having an okay time of it’. I’m having a BIG BAD TIME OF IT, DOLL.
I know that’s not very interesting. I’m not interested in it either. But I feel extremely, suffocatingly, infuriatingly fucking stuck in it. And thanks to some very tangled psychological webs that are apparently still rooted into my brainstem, my depression brings with it an incredible amount of excruciating bodily pain and exhausting fatigue. Physical pain that has been escalating for a decade and almost completely debilitating since 2018, but that I have barely experienced this year thanks to some psychological intervention, has come ROARING back into my life this week. My joints are screaming and my flesh is bellowing and I can’t fucking breathe. So I’m doing all I feel capable of right now, and what mother (Cardi B) taught me; posting thru it.
What follows is a line-by-line reading of Wham!’s unfairly maligned holiday spectacular, “Last Christmas”, interrupted quite frequently by my sick little brain begging for attention. Depression makes it hard to do things on time, or do anything at all, really. I’m sorry that this newsletter about a maligned, gay-in-both-ways holiday song came out three days late. I hope this thought soup finds you at the right time since this is the time it chose to exit my mind.
Anyway. Let’s talk about sad, gay Christmas!
🎶 Once bitten and twice shy
I keep my distance, but you still catch my eye
Tell me baby, do you recognize me?
Well, it's been a year, it doesn't surprise me 🎶
Is this song canonically gay because George Michael is singing it? Yes. Is it also canonically gay because it is overflowing with kind of confusing yearning about a relationship that doesn’t seem to have ever been clearly defined but still warranted enough suffering to write a SONG about?? Absolertly.
Also… biting? Shyyy? Asking someone if they literally recognize you while simultaneously invoking the overly-familiar pet name ‘baby’?? Call Me By Your Name found dead in a ditch. Waiting a whole year for a text back? Girl, get up!
Also also, the pop girlies LOVE to cover this one — points for gay. Hilary, Ashley, and Ariana are all topping the Spotify search results with their respective covers. That group of girl names could not sound more like the ranking members of a high school power clique if it was 16 in 2008 with a rhinestone bejeweled pink Razr. In conclusion, “Last Christmas” = Legalize Gay, darling <3
🎶 Happy Christmas, I wrapped it up and sent it
With a note saying "I love you", I meant it
Now I know what a fool I've been
But if you kissed me now, I know you'd fool me again 🎶
Being a hopeless romantic takes work. And by work, I do mean a relentless dedication to attaching romantic feelings to unattainable subjects. If you couldn’t ever actually be ‘with them’ for any assortment of potential reasons, then it’s safe for you to fall in love with them because they can never fall out of love with you. Sure you could get rejected upon approach, but then you’re really just in the same position you started at; a net neutral. Some people would call this ‘avoidant attachment’, but I’m still refusing to look into exactly what that means. Maybe my therapist would say this isn’t a good way to operate in the world, but ‘80s holiday bop “Last Christmas” is enabling me! And it has synths!!
I keep planning to, like, learn from my depression in order to outfox it. The thing is, depression fucks with your motivation. A lot. Not sure if mentioning that for the third time in this essay has hammered it home yet. So even if I know what I should be doing, the motivation to do it is as non-existent as the mathematical limit from “Mean Girls”. It’s like trying to create peanut butter m&ms out of thin air. What cord do you pull on when there’s nothing to grab?
🎶A crowded room, friends with tired eyes
I'm hiding from you and your soul of ice
My God, I thought you were someone to rely on
Me? I guess I was a shoulder to cry on🎶
This is where Wham! really digs into the world-building. A holiday party filled with your saddest friends and the object of your affection who spent the last year spurning you after you misread being used as being desired (oldest trick in the book). I can see the exact ugly sweater your roommate is wearing. The tree is decked out in gigantic, bulbous ‘80s Xmas lights and only the middle section is flashing. One guy has been hovering around the mistletoe and making eyes at every girl in a ten-foot radius all night.
I was on the phone with a college friend last week when I finally admitted how bad I was feeling, to her and myself. Someone else in her life isn’t doing well mentally either, not-well enough to take a 30-day trip, and hearing that admission was like the final split in the glacier of my mental mask; a thundering crack, and a dramatic calving. Now I can see all the dark blues in my insides.
🎶 A face on a lover with a fire in his heart
A man under cover, but you tore me apart
Oh, oh now I've found a real love
You'll never fool me again 🎶
A Christmas song about fiery, raging hearts and tearing apart like wrapping paper. This is what the people want! The theater of it all! Give us something to get too drunk to at the bars with our high school frenemies! Give us a line to mouth dramatically across the dance floor at the person who has no idea they were our crush for all of the hormone-soaked 10th grade! GIVE US A SONG WITH A TIKTOK DANCE AND A DREAM!
🎶 soooo looooong 🎶
I hope my depression fades out like the end of every song between 1970 and 1989. I did go ahead and learn the TikTok dance, from some gays, just in case an opportunity presents itself and my rusty bones cooperate.
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Did that feel like we got anywhere? I guess “Last Christmas” is gay and sad and that’s exactly why it’s perfect? I don’t know how well I defended this holiday anthem, but I don’t really get why people hate on it so much in the first place. Shit slaps. Time to get onboard the #slay sleigh, hunty.
I’ll leave you with a (different) really lovely wintercore TikTok that feels like falling into a dream, a peaceful one that looks like the place they tell you to go during inner child meditations where you feel safe and spend all your time marveling at the wondrous world around you. The way snow catches sound waves and snuggles them into silence is one of my favorite slices of natural magic.
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I hope you hug your cat and take a long bath tonight. I recommend adding to the ambience by lighting a holiday candle and setting your laptop on top of the trashcan while playing the bisexual Sex and the City episode. It’s brutal. It’s also very fucking funny, by accident.
I love you! Don’t text me that you’re worried about me! I’M TIRED AND I’M WORKING ON IT!
Sleepy-time-tea-ily,
Addison