Caitlin, I love this piece SO SO SO very much, because—as I messaged Mike Dang when I first read it—it is all “MY HEART, HOW DID YOU KNOW.”

I used to have the kind of warm, welcoming Christmas that has to do, as you noted, with having the resources to own a large home and a piano and special dishes on which to serve the annual holiday treats—and which probably also has to do with growing up in a small college town with enough economic stability that people move there to stay, get to know their neighbors, and have large parties that end with everyone putting on their coats and trooping outside to go caroling from door to door.

By the way, it isn’t lost on me that you describe the Johnsons’ party as the comfortable, magical part of the holiday, and your family celebration as something that carries its own undercurrent of stress and debt and “Am I being a good enough child to my parents? Should I be helping? Do they want me to help, or do they want me to wait to receive their gifts?”

So it goes, with so many families, and so it will go until the end of time.

But back to that party. Those big parties are what I miss most, about Christmas, and there are so many pieces that have to come together to make a party like that happen—in addition to the “large home” factor, as well as the other resource-based stuff like “enough comfortable chairs for everybody” and “enough time and money to invest in learning how to properly cook,” you also need a group of people who have known each other for years.

That’s the big piece a lot of us don’t have yet; we haven’t built the adult friendships to support these kinds of holiday traditions (which we could do, in varied form, in our small apartments), or maybe we have these friendships but our friends are scattered across the country and/or constantly moving somewhere new.

I’ve made special trips to attend these kinds of parties, on the rare weekends when my friends and I can all travel to gather in one place. I’ve also gone to way too many parties where I know maybe one person in the sea of guests, and I stand around awkwardly shouting where I’m from and what I do until I feel exhausted and go home.

(This is part of why you also need—and this is a whole ‘nother post entirely, so I won’t spend too much time on it—you need people who know how to host. You can’t just dump a bunch of bodies into a room and hope that it turns into a party. You need someone to introduce guests to each other, start conversations, and say “It’s time to gather around the piano.” This is a hugely unappreciated skill, and it’s part of why so many parties are so dismal.)

Honestly, I bet you can do the rest without the middle-class resources a previous generation might have had. You could dump a little booze into a carton of Safeway eggnog. You could put out Totino’s Pizza Rolls, or ask everyone to bring something and then spend the night making jokes about the four round bins of Trader Joe’s brownie bites. You can definitely do the “sing along to YouTube videos” thing if you don’t have a piano, because I’ve done that and it works.

But it’s hard to have a good party without good friends, who know this party happens every year and that—if the fates allow—they’ll all be singing around the laptop together next Christmas.