Christmas is by far my favorite holiday. I look forward to it every year the way a lot of kids look forward to their birthdays, and every year it gets harder and harder to wait until Thanksgiving to start cranking Christmas music.

I know that this puts me out of step with a lot of people who have, let’s say, complicated relationships with the holiday. And hey, if you work retail and have to hear “All I Want for Christmas is You” 16,000 times a day, I get the hate for Christmas music.

So let’s try to change that perception, because there are so many excellent Christmas songs that you’ll never hear on the radio this time of year.

The thing is, as much as I love Christmas, my relationship with it is also complicated. It’s never as fun or joyful as I build my expectations for throughout the year, and as much as I love it, my happiness is always tinged by a strong undercurrent of melancholy.

It makes me think of the friends and family that are no longer in my life, whether due to death or just drifting apart. The memories of how fun and special Christmas was in my childhood just remind me that I’ll never really be able to recapture that magic; I’m not nine anymore. And the general state of the world can’t be escaped no matter how much I try to focus on themes of peace and love and joy to the world and what-have-you.

So while I love a fun banger like All I Want for Christmas is You or Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey, the real Christmas music I look forward to all year are the songs that speak to that sadness and melancholy that I feel. In this series of posts I’m going to highlight some of my favorite sad, morose, melancholy, extremely-depressing Christmas songs, and also talk about songwriting and writing in general. We’re starting with a big one for me: “Christmas in L.A.” by The Killers.

The Killers have an entire album’s worth of truly excellent Christmas songs. I’m not kidding–there are like 8 that I’d put on my list of favorite Christmas songs.

That article I linked ranked “Christmas in L.A.” last. First of all I disagree because they’re literally all #1, but also, their reasoning is faulty. Comparing it to country-pop feels like something you’d only do if you’d never listened to country-pop before. Go ahead, listen–and while you’re at it, watch the video starring Owen Wilson and with a fun little cameo from Harry Dean Stanton.

What gets me about this song, aside from the trademark Brandon Flowers soaring vocals, is how it portrays a general mood that I can relate to through the specificity of its lyrics.

“Christmas in L.A.” is about a struggling actor from somewhere else (somewhere with real winter, going by the “white Christmas” reference in the bridge) celebrating Christmas alone in Los Angeles. He gets a package from his parents with a present, but the whole thing is pervaded by a “well-rehearsed disinterest in the atmosphere.” Our narrator doesn’t know if the disinterest from and in his family is a result of him being in L.A., or why he came in the first place.

Our narrator sings about his flailing acting career (“Another casting call on Thursday for a job that doesn’t pay”) and a lover left behind “in my old man’s truck.”

The narrator isn’t exactly at rock-bottom, right? He’s drinking pitchers of sangria, pursuing a passion, living in a big city…but it’s just not working out the way it’s supposed to, y’know? It wasn’t what it was supposed to be.

See, “Christmas in L.A.” is really about the transition to adulthood, and having to accept that pursuing your dreams isn’t the fairy-tale success story we’re all promised as American children. Kids of my generation (millennials) and older were told “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up!” Not just by our parents, either; countless movies and shows and teachers and motivational speakers drilled into us that America was a land of opportunity where anyone can be anything, so long as you make a few good choices (say no to drugs, go to college) and work for it.

I don’t think today’s kids are hearing that message. Definitely not as confidently as I was, anyways. And the reason for that is simple–I don’t think anyone other than the most deluded and privileged segments of American liberalism seriously believes that bullshit anymore.

I’m not going to make this a big political thing, but we all know what I’m talking about. We’re all struggling with the economy, with the job market, with the destruction of our social lives, with an uncertain future.

And even aside from all that, my own personal pursuit of my dreams is, like most people’s, a story of compromise and longing and unfulfillment.

I never tried to be an actor, but I have been trying to be a musician, a writer, a video game developer, for years, with very little to show for it other than a lot of fond memories (which isn’t nothing). But that gets to the heart of it–most of us are never going to be famous actors, musicians, writers, anything. How many thousands of would-be actors have spent Christmas in L.A. trying to make it in Hollywood, to no avail?

I’m not whining; this is a fundamental part of the human experience in modern capitalist society. I love “Christmas in L.A.” because it captures that feeling, but instead of a shmaltzy view from the outside (I’m thinking of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” where the narrator is explicitly a talented artist observing all of the untalented and desperate plebs in the bar with pity and fascination) it gets very specific in order to express a very relatable and common feeling.

I know viscerally how it feels to long for the kind of Christmas I used to love as a kid. To have loved ones be far away, or not in your life anymore. To look at years spent in pursue of artistic dreams and wonder “What was the point of all of that?” To feel like I’m “basking in my decay,” like the narrator of the song.

I feel, quite often, that I’m not “really” an adult. (I’m a twice-married parent of two with a mortgage and two master’s degrees and a career and I still feel this way.) That the adult world has passed me by while I’m still clutching onto dreams of being a rockstar and an author.

“Maybe she got married and had a couple of kids,” sings the narrator of his lost lover. He’s not a discouraged nineteen-year-old, he’s a despondent late-twentysomething (or worse, thirtysomething, like me) asking the same kinds of questions as I am about my life, how I got here, what the hell I’m even doing, against the backdrop of a time of year that we know we’re supposed to spend feeling joyful and thankful.

The lesson for writers here is that you don’t need to stand at a distance to make your readers/listeners feel what you want them to feel. The universal and specific aren’t opposites; they’re contained within each other. Sometimes your work will be more relatable if you’re willing to get very close to a very specific subject.

See, I never tried to be an actor, and I never moved away from my home city. I’ve never even been to L.A.

But emotionally, metaphorically, spiritually, I don’t know if I can take another Christmas in L.A.

Listen to the song here!