My grandma had these paintings everywhere, these scenes of Victorian Christmas. Currier & Ives, Norman Rockwell, everything, up in frames and on those silly round plates with art on them. There were lots of snowy churches and horse-drawn sleighs with freshly hacked pine trees strapped to them. Men in tall hats and women in bonnets singing Christmas carols, either looking way too excited or slightly terrifying with perfectly round mouths and monstrous wax faces. She had these miniature villages, too, and she laid them out every year. A sheet of cotton went on the bottom, which was supposed to be snow. Then all kinds of little houses and churches and stores, all lit up from inside, all of them with snow on the roofs.
Everything was an ideal of an ideal. What it taught me, from a young age, was that Christmas was supposed to look a certain way. I grew up to be really bitter and cynical when I realized that life didn't work that way. Winter didn't always mean cold or snow and sometimes, if things didn't go right, Christmas ended up being just another day.
That didn't mean I lost that naive, idealistic part of me. I just learned to channel it differently.
Video games help.
This year, I thought I'd share a few titles with pretty winter scenery, or at the very least, bone-chilling cold, for those of you that need some idealized holiday cheer. So grab a mug of cider, wassail, or Southern Comfort Gingerbread Spice, and let's have our own idealized holiday.
