Not unlike the alignment of the stars on the day you were born and where you went to kindergarten, your favorite Christmas cartoon special can say a lot about you. Santa or Grinch, Cindy Lou Who or Lucy--who you like defines your personality in some ways. Forget about Carl Jung and his personality test. What you'll learn from us is far more valuable. Happy holidays!
Like the Grinch, your disdain for the suburban way of life is palpable, but a touch insincere. For while you swear you've never set foot into a Pottery Barn or a Home Depot, you secretly resent the happiness of middle-class nesters and wish you, too, could buy matching throw pillows on the Internet instead of tracking them down at a vintage furniture store three states away. You detest Christmas music, but not enough to commit Grinch-like crime. You wouldn't be caught dead using multicolored Christmas lights or serving store-bought eggnog--it's organic and homemade, or it's nothing. You also despise public displays of holiday spirit. But unlike the Grinch, whose heart was two sizes too small, your heart is a normal size, though you don't wear it on your sleeve, and you give to charities generously, but anonymously. You're a cat person.
Some aspect of your life, whether it be your looks, education, or career path, has left you feeling pathologically insecure. You are constantly seeking the approval of others through invitations to their little "games." At work, you feel underappreciated, overused, and taken for granted, whether your feelings are warranted or not (since you do spend a lot of time gabbing around cubicles). People who love this show tend to feel loved only for what they can do for other people, not for their personality, and are often in the performing arts or finance. If you weren't struggling so hard not to feel sorry for yourself and worrying about appearing über-normal, your true talents would shine through and you'd be famous even without your fat red boss calling the shots.
You are a hopeless optimist who has never called a glass half-empty in your life. The kind of person who sings in the shower and makes cookies for crabby neighbors, you are happy and alive only when you are making other people happy. You probably deserve any number of awards, but you don't get them because they usually go to brown-nosers. You probably work with children or in some world-saving capacity that is really making a difference. Oh, and you are carbon-neutral, but spend too much money on haberdashery and may have a lot of credit-card debt.
A real romantic, you attack the holiday season with a passion on par with that of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Resistant to change, you have decorated all six of your trees the same beautiful way for years. Your family has been known to call you the "X-mas gestapo" behind your back, but you do give the best presents, gorgeously wrapped, of course. You might also pretend that you've never seen the movie Christmas in Connecticut or ever subscribed to a Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia magazine--but in all honesty, you've seen the film 456 times and subscribe to all of Martha's mags ... even the iPad versions. Weirdly, this movie is also a favorite of those who absolutely despise Christmas, since it "proves" the holiday to be just another made-up, commercialized fairy tale based on the eponymous song from 1934 with Tom Stacks on vocal. And perhaps predictably, it is loved by hipsters who like to throw around the name Mayor Burgermeister Meisterburger.
If this one is your favorite, it's probably because of the fabulous performances of the Heat and Cold Misers, brothers caught in an eternal dialectic between hot and cold. They're just bit players in the Christmas pageant, but if you love them, it's probably because you are, like them, eccentric and prone to attention-seeking and extreme behavior.
You are a romantic and probably practice hot yoga. You bemoan the loss of spirituality and real magic that Christmas had when you were a kid. You may also be prone to wishful thinking, which your friends cruelly call immaturity behind your back. But your conflictedness about the overcommercialism of Christmas and the lack of attention paid to Jesus's birth does honestly disturb you, though you rarely set foot in a church. But there's a real fun streak hidden in all that angst, and you'd like nothing better than to dance and drink your troubles away at the end of a really confusing day.
If you favor this film, you despise red and green and wish Christmas would get a bit hipper in its color choices. You are also a thrill seeker and truth teller--people brace themselves for your opinions because you make it crystal clear that you are always unhappy with the world as it exists and never satisfied with the status quo, and doubt that anybody ever knows their real motivation for anything they do. A fateful summer with Foucault sometime in college hardened you to festive Winter Wonderlands, and you suspect the symbolism of the season has evil intent. You may also be prone to gossiping.
If you're a lover of this brand-new Christmas "classic," you're likely an introverted perfectionist with trust issues and delusions of self-importance. Your friends and family treat you like a lovable curmudgeon, but you remember fondly the days when you were intimidating and people ran from your rage. Resistant to self-analysis, you also do whatever you do in such a dizzyingly inconsistent way that people think you are hysterically funny and interesting. All people, that is, except your spouse.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
