Reading · Amazing Stories from Hunter Chadwick

As you read in the title, this author joined the world of grand parenting two months ago and my wife and I are celebrating this holiday season with our first visit to the little guy. He’s an amazing young man. ;)

We’ve spent the last six weeks traveling, visiting family and friends and ending our trip with a visit to Spain to see our first grandson. It hasn’t been good for my writing, but it has been great for my soul. I still have a goal to finish two books in 2026. They are currently about 25% and 60% written. Assuming the Audiobook project goes well (see the sample below), I also hope to release 3 Audiobooks in 2026 (Getting There From Here, Before It Began and Across the Shining Sea).

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was released 31 years ago, right before Halloween. It has endured in popularity in pop culture and every year it finds more devotees. I recently read an essay on X about the movie and wanted to share it with you and get your thoughts on the perspective. The original essay can be found here. It is the kind of long rambling essay common to X, filled with misspellings and no capitalization. I’ve made efforts to correct these things. As an editor, I can’t help myself. :)

“I. A strange film: after three decades, it's still a feature of the cultural landscape (year round), you see its imagery often - it clearly has a special relationship to us. Some people seem to instinctively take on this movie as part of their personality. I remember going to a girl’s room once and she had a Nightmare Before Christmas blanket. “Yeah, that makes sense”. People wear shirts of it, bumper stickers - all year, not just at either holiday.’

This is noteworthy because it’s a holiday film that transcends the holidays. This is usually the opposite of what holiday movies do. They’re usually especially confined to their seasonal domain. Someone wouldn’t really wear Christmas movie gear in spring, as a general rule. It’s also noteworthy that this movie seems to lack an obvious folkloric / mythical / archetypal resonance. I’m sure we could shoehorn something in, but it doesn’t fit an obvious pattern or precedence, to me. that just makes the above facts, it’s archetypal resonance, even stranger.

II. On what is called “spooky”, and magic. Spooky can mean many things. something that reveals a hidden other world is spooky. The place Jack is from, Halloween Town, is not that type of spooky. They live in this realm, it is not an “other world” to them. The spookiness here, which is native to Jack - which is, really, his entire world and paradigm - is that of the bizarre, disturbing, or inverted. It is the aesthetic of spookiness. we could call this creepy: his world is obsessed with the dark and bizarre for its own sake.

Enter: Christmas. He experiences many aspects of Christmas, all from the perspective of an outsider. His Christmas experience is parsed as, “wow, amazing, what is this?” (the main song is called ‘what’s this?’). He’s completely charmed and entranced, but its essence eludes him. His experience of Christmas is self-described as the feeling of missing some hidden core: the thing that really makes it what it is. The whole point of it. That’s the main theme: here’s the lights, here are the bells, he even boils an ornament in his lab. He has all the stuff.

But the stuff isn’t the answer for “what is Christmas?”. He correctly intuits that the stuff is superfluous. He’s on the surface level. He knows he is clearly missing the thing Christmas is really about. He cannot see or grasp the thing at the core that makes Christmas what it is.

III. Secular. My posit is that the reason this movie has an instinctual resonance in our culture is because Jack’s experience is the experience of the modern person, here explicated as their experience of the holidays. This is what Christmas is like for the modern secular child.

We (especially children) are native to a world that is just kind of creepy and dark - then our culture chooses to focus on those things and highlight them. We also present a lot of it to children to extend the metaphor, Halloween is very creepy and dark. It’s also a kids holiday. Then, you see Christmas, and it’s the total opposite of this. Nice, warm, love, light, inviting - everyone loves Christmas, just like Jack. It’s intoxicatingly beautiful. You love Christmas. The modern secular child or adult loves Christmas. It’s most people’s favorite holiday.

These modern secular people can participate in Christmas in a variety of ways, but, like Jack, they are totally locked out of its core: being a modern secular person literally precludes you from fully being a part of what Christmas is actually about. Notably: Jack never figures it out - because he can’t. It’s precluded from his universe. He is correct in his assessment, 100%: the magic of Christmas is not about any of the things he sees or participates in or obtains. Its all downstream of something he never even gets close to.

IV. So, what is Christmas? Christmas is, literally, a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. To even point this out feels like proselytization - but that is simply a matter of actual fact. Paradoxically, this is both comically obvious and totally obscured in modern Christmas. Jack never gets this information, his issue is real. “What is this magical enchanting thing really about? I feel that I’m only on the surface level”. That is true. The lights, gifts, decor, and so on, are all literally about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.

This is a perfect analogy for a secular child’s experience of Christmas. There’s this magic space, I want to inhabit it. But it’s not “of you”. It’s other. It’s not your world. You don’t actually believe in the thing that, at the core, is what it’s all about. You are not part of it. Jack is from Halloween world. That’s who he is. So, when he participates in Christmas, he makes it like Halloween. that’s the whole movie.

That’s the modern secular person. You can see the stuff in this other realm, and the stuff in it is so cool and magical. You really love it. But the core of it, the thing that makes it what it is, is antithetical to you. So, when you try to participate in it, you make it more secular. You make it more like your world - when what drew you to it in the first place is that it’s the opposite of your world. You are Jack.

And that’s what happens in the movie. This is why people instinctually resonate with this tale. This is the modern secular person’s experience of Christmas, especially children. You could also extend this out to other phenomena that have their origin in religion. That’s it. Thanks.” End of essay.

I think he might be on to something. What do you think? Leave a comment or fill out the poll below.

Merry Christmas from a New Grandpa

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