here’s my chaotic family christmas letter.

There’s no time like the present to partake in one of the cringiest holiday traditions out there.

Queering the Burbs is a regularly-published distillation of pop culture, politics and queerness written by Joe Erbentraut. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing (it’s free!), liking or sharing this piece. Order Joe’s new zine, Issue #01, here.

This is what I imagine the scene looks like where most of these family Christmas letters are being composed. (Photo: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash)

Can I admit something weirdly personal here? I’ve always wanted to write and send a family Christmas letter, but I’ve never really known how to go about it.

The ones I’ve read before were packed with updates on distant family members I haven’t seen in years, or vacations I hardly cared about, and pets I’d never met—and somehow the contents of these letters wouldn’t change too much from year to year, like they were following some unspoken template.

If I only had the chance, I promised myself, my Christmas letter would be different. Rather than some sort of excuse for humble bragging, this correspondence would dive all the way into the little absurdities of everyday life; the times over the course of the previous year when things went horribly wrong. Then another year would come and go and no Christmas letter would be sent.

Since I (ahem) suddenly find myself with a bit more free time than usual, I thought it was time to share at last my version of the tried-and-true family Christmas letter with you all.

Happy holidays, merry solstice, and goddess help us all in the year ahead. I have a feeling we’ll need it.

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Greetings, well-wisher!

What a year it has been. If you follow me on social media, you can probably already guess at 2024’s highs (I published my first zine!) and lows (I got laid off two weeks before Christmas!) in my personal life, so I won’t bore you with those details. Instead, what I’ve decided to share in this festive mailing for you are some of the other highlights that didn’t make it to the Instagram grid (because, after all, I’m now of an age where I’m not entirely clear how or if I’m supposed to be doing that.

I’m happy to report that my cat Dresden is pooping quite well these days. In recent months and years, she’s had a tendency to get rather backed up, even requiring her first enema some months ago. But these days seem to be mostly behind her now, thanks for asking (I know, you didn’t).

Speaking of digestion, I ate a lot of hot dogs this year—some good, many bad. Here is a ranking of the top hot dogs and other encased meats I consumed this year:

1. Chicago dog from the Thalia Hall bar during a Brittany Howard concert, February

2. Multiple Chicago dogs from the Batavia Boardwalk Shops, summer

3. A street dog in Times Square, December

4. A brat(?) from the cafeteria at the House on the Rock in Wisconsin, August

I ate some other bits of culinary finery this year. My first Panera bread bowl in years. Those Southwest egg rolls at Chili’s at least three times. An aggressively decadent lazy Susan (!) relish tray at a restaurant in Madison this summer. 2024 was quite a memorable year for the tastebuds overall.

It was also a packed year for other firsts in my life. Both my husband Stefin and I got Covid for the first time in August. Our illness coincided with the release of that unfortunate Chimp Crazy documentary, which made us so uncomfortable that I think it lengthened our recovery somehow.

Two more firsts were of the celestial variety. We saw the northern lights in our backyard for the first time this summer. And I also watched a partial solar eclipse in a Taco Bell parking lot for the first time, in April. It was honestly pretty underwhelming.

Some more firsts from 2024:

• First time using a bidet in an Iowa hotel room (refreshing!)

• First time seeing Rockefeller Center at Christmas (overwhelming!)

• First time doing one of those 360-degree spinning photo booths (dark energy!)

• First time buying a Cameo video from Tonya Harding (not really worth it!)

• First time seeing a Rolling Stones tribute band live (quite convincing!)

• First time being mistaken for Post Malone by teens at my local Target (confusing!)

• First time developing a parasocial relationship with a pair of geese who briefly nested near our home (heartbreaking after they left!)

• First time owning a porch goose (very rewarding!)

I’d be remiss to not mention some of my biggest professional achievements, too—even if I am technically unemployed at the moment.

I’m proud to say that publicists from a puzzlingly wide array of companies have added me to their lists, and I have since received packages from such flashy brands as Old Spice deodorant and Skippy peanut butter. I also received a giant cooler filled with a single, miniature salami once too.

I also had the chance to interview a few celebrities through my job, most memorably Traitors and Real Housewives icon Phaedra Parks, who (totally unprompted) informed me that I had as much time as I needed to conduct the interview because she was stuck at home for colonoscopy prep. I panicked and wished her a “happy colonoscopy” at the end of our phone call.

I also met celebrities outside of work totally unknowingly! While staying at an Airbnb with friends near Portland this fall, I met a vocally anti-vax former Australian soap opera star (the girlfriend of our host) with a dating history that reportedly includes Shia Lebeouf, Jared Leto, Adrian Grenier, Jake Gyllenhaal, and a Hemsworth brother. Her skin glowed in that classic Nicole Kidman style.

There were other highlights of course. I saw Leto’s band live and felt deeply uncomfortable. I witnessed Theresa Caputo (Long Island Medium) live and felt deeply uncomfortable again. I got into an unsettlingly deep conversation with a 74-year-old waitress named Rita at an Olive Garden in December (she is begging us youngins to invest ASAP). I got to be among the oldest people to see a stop of the Sweat tour, and experienced the lower back pain to prove it.

I also successfully surprised my husband with a birthday party. We gathered with all the other lesbians in a six-state radius at the Sarah McLachlan concert. I was moved to tears by the Laurie Anderson exhibit at the Hirshhorn. I sang Celine Dion at the top of my lungs in the car with my nephew en route to the Titanic exhibit he so desperately wanted to go see.

I guess a lot of this feels sort of trivial, but I hope that when I’ll look back at these jotted-down memories and reread this again some day, years from now, I’ll be grateful that I packed my life with a whole bunch of mundane joy and pure silliness shared with the people I loved most. Some things are going well in my life and other things are going badly, and I’m sure that’s the case for you too. Putting the good and bad aside for just a second, I hope that your year had plenty of moments of real joy and silliness with your people, too. And no matter what lies ahead for us all, I hope that your 2025 has even more of all of the above. You deserve it. We all do.

XOXO

Joe

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SONG OF THE RIGHT-NOW

I’ve been on a bit of a kick listening to LA indie pop band The Marías lately. They’re not exactly underground these days—they just opened for a leg of Billie Eilish’s tour, after all—but there’s something about their sound (and specifically vocalist María Zardoya’s voice—that harkens back to ‘90s pop from the likes of The Cardigans.

“We’re the Lucky Ones” is a holiday track they recorded at some point. I think it captures the undercurrent of melancholy that truly makes the holidays what they are.