Christmas icon gives Santa real competition, at least on retail shelves.

As I scramble to meet my quota of articles before the end of December and the end of 2024, I have to churn out a few more pieces of low-hanging fruit or I won’t get it all done.  And so, with photos taken a mere two days before Christmas, I offer the best evidence I can of an emergent Christmas icon.

Given the bustle of the season, I’m struggling to remember which retailer hosted all this slime-green paraphernalia.  But it probably doesn’t matter.  It could have been Hobby Lobby or Michael’s (the most obvious candidates), but it just as easily could have been Kohl’s.  (Probably not Target; these days its shelves are rarely that full.)  But I can’t imagine how, ten years ago, even the most focused of category-killer stores would have ever offered something this voluminous:

Indeed, it’s an entire aisle of plushes, bowls, plates, mugs, aprons, board games, and lampshades devoted to a nearly 70-year-old character that grows into more and more of a Christmas icon each year: the Grinch from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  And not just The Mean One himself, but replicas of his dog Max and of course the various Whos in Whoville—especially Cindy-Lou Who.

I’m one of many who believes the adjective “iconic” gets overused, but I first started noticing a brighter shade of green among Christmas decorations about a decade ago, when an inflatable Grinch started presiding over various front yards.  The inflatables gained prominence a good decade after the live-action Grinch movie starring Jim Carrey, at least five years after the musical premiered on Broadway, but before the debut of the CGI movie voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch.  The cat-faced sourpuss is now everywhere: almost as ubiquitous and recognizable as Santa Claus, whose costume he appropriates as he makes his overnight heist of Whoville’s Christmas spirit.  I’ve seen parents use the humanoid as a personified lump of coal, recruiting the neighbor or mischievous uncle to dress as the Grinch, who invades a home to abscond with the presents or the tree, thus terrifying the misbehaving children in December.  It’s also not hard to find lore that fuses the two figures: like a Santa/Grinch parkour chase scene.  And let’s at least gloss over the Grinch memes: once he became a centerpiece to easily distributable, primitive jokes, he would never be a once-a-year outlier again.  Not only is he ubiquitous, he is perpetual.

***SPOILER ALERTS***

I have no problem with cultivating a new Christmas icon, or with that Christmas icon being a signature Dr. Seuss character.  Not that I have anything wrong with Santa, but if St. Nick is going to get some competition, pop culture could offer something a whole lot worse.  A less-than-photogenic figure like the Grinch would not be so beloved if his story didn’t have a redemption arc, much the same way Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has achieved immortality because its sour protagonist transcends his personal demons by the end.  Both “Scrooge” and “Grinch” have become so ubiquitous that they have achieved generic status, like the brand Xerox or Kleenex.  We can remove the capital letter from scrooge and grinch and recognize that they are a proxy for “miser” and “killjoy” respectively, pitting themselves against the joy of the season and ultimately losing the fight, resulting in denouements where they succumb to the spirit and give their respective tales a happy ending.  But nobody’s going to mistake their last names for what they represent during the 80% of their respective tales.  And no parents would dare name their child “Ebenezer”.

Additionally, the Grinch might be, ironically, an effective way to recognize Christmas while dodging controversy.  Like Carol, it is only obliquely religious.  Dickens’s Victorian tale uses ghosts to offer a cautionary tale about morality, while Dr. Seuss’s Whoville is a parallel universe with references to worship that eschew a divine focal point.  As I was teasing out this subject, a commenter of mine noted: the growing prevalence of the Grinch “is seen by elementary school teachers as some sort of secular-ish pop culture proxy for the Holiday Season and therefore ok to use for curricula/fun during December.”  Though I don’t imagine this gets articulated in departmental meetings, I suspect there’s some truth to it.  It’s a safe secular representation in public schools for those who might perceive Santa Claus is synonymous with Christmas.  At least the Grinch offers one degree of separation.

Let people introduce a fluorescent green to their Christmas decorations.  Let them include the dog Max and the winsomely innocent Cindy-Lou Who.  As much as the Grinch is a Christmas icon that most people, even the most cynical, can celebrate—certainly with a higher approval rating than Clark Griswold or the frah-gee-lay leg lamp—it’s hard not to see this enormous aisle of Grinch merchandise as an ironic gesture that completely ignores Theodor Giesel’s original message under his nom de plume: that the essence of Christmas isn’t baubles and noise-makers but the capacity to bring people together as a community, whether through worshipping and celebrating the birth of their religion’s key figure, whether it be a Savior or  “Fahoo Fores Dahoo Dores”.  Yet, here I witnessed an aisle filled with all the tags, the tinsel, the trimmings, the trappings.  And I criticize it.  Guess we know by December 26th who the real grinch is.