The Annual Holiday Enshittification

The truth about holiday “magic” from the women keeping it alive.

Every December, glossy magazines and cheesy commercials insist this is the most wonderful time of the year. Snowflakes twinkle, cocoa steams, and families in matching pajamas gaze lovingly at one another while the dog farts softly by the fire.

Meanwhile, the holidays in real life often look less like a Hallmark movie and more like a logistical meltdown powered by caffeine and emotional labor. Sure, there’s joy, in the same way a colonoscopy can be “spa-like.” Mostly it’s chaos disguised in tinsel, covered in sugar, and scented of mulled wine and regret. Prices go up, quality goes down, and even the lights on your pre-lit tree have taken emotional leave.

And through it all, women are the (missing) Scotch tape holding civilization together as it collapses into one long glitter-covered, enshittified marathon.

Let’s review the year’s worst offenders.

Online Shopping: The Digital Mall of Broken Promises

Cybershopping was supposed to save us: pajamas, couch, and two-day delivery. No traffic, no parking, no sales clerks named Candi judging your bra size. Just one-click bliss.

Instead, it’s the holiday equivalent of Vegas. Every “Buy Now” click is a roll of the dice: Will it arrive early, late, or never? Items disappear from your cart like socks in the dryer. You add them again, and the algorithm responds by suggesting eight unrelated products, one of which costs more than your car. Coupon codes taunt you: “This offer does not apply to your order.” Then what does it apply to? A rotary phone? A Chia pet? Your dignity?

By checkout, your cart is a shrine to panic: a sequined cat sweater, a bath bomb called “Yuletide Regret,” and a neck massager that doubles as marital therapy. Half your gifts come in boxes the size of a refrigerator for an item the size of a spoon. The other half are still “in transit” from somewhere that may or may not exist.

And just when you think you’re done, Amazon emails you at 2 a.m. with “Things You May Have Forgotten.”

Spoiler: It’s always your sanity.

The Post Office: Hell in a Hand-Stamped Basket

Welcome to the building where holiday spirit goes to die. You enter with a stack of neatly labeled packages and the delusion of hope. You’re met with a line that snakes through three zip codes. A toddler is licking the Priority Mail sign. A man named Duke refuses to use the self-service kiosk because “it’s watching him.”

Someone’s shipping fireworks. Someone else is mailing homemade pies to six different time zones. When you finally reach the counter, you’ve forgotten your name, your purpose, and the meaning of Christmas.

Your packages might make it.

You might not.

Hair Salon: The Blowout Before the Breakdown

You arrive seeking a holiday “refresh.” Maybe some highlights, something that says “polished woman who has her life together” instead of “survivor of 37 holiday parties and a menopause mood swing.”

You leave emotionally waterboarded and $200 poorer.

You’re folded over a neck-snapping sink that feels like an OSHA violation while your stylist cheerfully gossips about her Pilates instructor. Foils, plastic wrap, and chemicals strong enough to strip paint from a car are stacked on your head like a toxic tiara. A 22-year-old next to you is getting holiday glitter extensions while filming an Instagram Story. You smell like scorched coconut and your hair looks perfect for precisely six hours—until humidity or your pillow erases it like a crime scene.

You tip four people and possibly someone who just walked by holding a broom.

Foiled again.

The Apple Store: iPanic at the Genius Bar

The Apple Store is what purgatory would look like if a higher power outsourced design to a millennial startup. It’s shiny, silent, and full of people pretending they understand cloud storage. Time ceases to exist. You walk in at noon, blink, and it’s suddenly 2027 and whatever you wanted to buy is already obsolete.

There are no signs, only “zones.” You stand in one for 40 minutes to tell a 19-year-old Genius named Eli you just want an iPad. There are 29 options. All look identical. One costs $400, one costs $1,800, and one might actually be a cutting board. You can’t tell anymore.

You finally stagger to the checkout, except there isn’t one. Eli scans your retinas—or maybe your soul—and you leave with a small white box that looks like it should contain earrings, not a minor financial crisis.

You tell yourself it’s an investment.

In what, exactly, remains unclear.

Dressing Rooms: The Trauma of Underwire and Fluorescent Lighting

Holiday party season means trying on clothing designed by sadists. You go in hopeful, latte in hand. You exit pale, sweaty, and muttering about polyester and the patriarchy.

Mirrors are rigged by someone with a personal vendetta against humanity. Dresses are sized for teenagers or Mrs. Claus—nothing in between. Underwire feels like betrayal. Shapewear promises “support,” but are clearly built for someone without internal organs. Sequins advertise “holiday sparkle” but deliver “disco ball with trust issues.”

You’ve sweat through your Spanx, lost an earring, and your FitBit congratulates you on a cardio workout you never signed up for. You leave empty-handed, convinced that elastic waistbands are the highest form of feminism.

Trader Joe’s: Holiday Hunger Games

Trader Joe’s in December is not a grocery store. It’s a suburban battlefield dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. The aisles are gridlocked. Peppermint hoarders snatch up Candy Cane Joe-Joes like doomsday preppers. A couple blocks the wine section to debate tannins. A man in Santa suspenders loudly recommends his favorite cheese to strangers.

Every product screams “limited edition,” which is retail code for “panic now, regret later.” You start hoarding things you don’t even like. (Do I need novelty chocolates shaped like snowmen? No. Will I fight someone for them? Possibly.)

You leave dazed, inexplicably holding a poinsettia, five bags of cauliflower gnocchi, and nothing that was on your list.

It’s festive.

It’s feral.

It’s cookie butter-scented CrossFit.

Peace on Earth (or at Least in My Living Room)

Holiday magic doesn’t just “happen.” It’s engineered by women wearing Santa hats and the weight of everyone’s expectations.

We’re wrestling a toy assembly manual clearly written by demons, searching for scissors that have vanished like Amelia Earhart, and serving as emotional support elf, logistics coordinator, and crisis negotiator to everyone else. Meanwhile, our adult kids breeze in from their in-laws’ big dinner tired and grumpy, the grandkids are sugar-ruined and vibrating like overcaffeinated hummingbirds, and we start to understand why the Grinch lived alone in a cave with his dog.

But yet … we survive.

Packages (eventually) arrive. Hair gets (sort of) styled. Wrapping paper (mostly) covers the boxes. The commercials never show this version of the holiday, but it’s the real one. And while it’s not perfect, it’s yours.

So pour a glass of novelty Trader Joe’s wine, light the good candle, and toast yourself. In a world determined to enshittify everything, choosing to laugh—especially at the absurdity of it all—might be the greatest gift of the season.