Charlie Brown and Sufjan Know the ‘Good Grief’ of Christmas

Sufjan Stevens’ Songs for Christmas boxset includes a memoir essay about how the smell of a burning spatula sent him tumbling into old Christmas memories and, eventually, something like a spiritual revelation—“a tragic-comic-sentimental shock that was simultaneously mundane and supernatural.”

In the vision Stevens describes, the smell of melting plastic becomes a portal to the whole universe, past and present, and “at the very center of the universe I saw the Christ Child … This was the mysterious Incarnation of God. It feels about right that Stevens would treat Christmas like both a theological mystery and a craft-store accident.