Our Tacky Christmas

I love the elegant Christmas-dining pictures in Bon Appétit. The holiday dishes and cutlery in the pricey Williams-Sonoma catalogue. The winter ornaments and widgets arranged so beautifully by Restoration Hardware. The season’s advertisements in the New Yorker, the Sunday Times magazine, House Beautiful, and all the rest—clean, refined, sophisticatedly simple expressions of upper-middle-class taste, displayed in magazines for the rest of the middle class to gaze at in wonder. To aspire to in hope. To ache for in greed.