If you want to be a writer in America today, you had better like making lists—especially at the end of the year. “It can be of anything!” Web editors say, as the December days get shorter and darker, like mustaches during periods of Fascism. Why? Why are we doing this? Why lists? Why December? Another mystery: whenever I find myself writing such a list, I think, This is an hour of my life I will never get back; yet, when I see a seemingly cool list online, I totally read it! I do!
Because it’s the season of giving, I’m contributing a list of my own, hoping to bring to others the same thirty to forty-five seconds of mild interest I have received so many times. And, because I’m a naturally inquisitive person, I’m going to use this list to probe the question of why we need lists at the end of the year.
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1. Conditioning
Most Americans have probably heard the song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” about a billion times in the supermarket alone. It stands to reason that we associate “making a list and checking it twice” with Christmas—and also with gifts, adding the element of what behaviorists call “positive reinforcement.”
2. Disaster Preparation
Doomsday, traditionally a December event (Mayan apocalypse, Y2K, etc.), is strongly associated with lists. On Judgment Day, the Book of Life—a prototype for Santa’s list—will reveal the names of the righteous. On the off chance that the end of the year is the End of Days, we need to know which of 2013’s rom-coms should be the ones floating up to Jesus, and/or are the ones we need on DVD to distract us from the floodwaters rising outside our windows, after the Internet has broken forever.
3. Efficiency
Another thing the holidays have in common with the apocalypse: we’re all really busy. Lists save us time. “I don’t need the story of his life! Just tell me if he’s in or out.”
4. The Death Drive
Sure, one reason we like lists is that we don’t want to die. But another reason is, perhaps, just the opposite. What’s the best part of a to-do list? Crossing items off! In a sense, every list is a hit list, and part of the reassurance we get from best-of lists is the knowledge that these things are finite, and their end will be reached. Hence the immediate conceptual graspability of “Desert Island Discs,” which links the threat of imminent death with the project of making a top-eight list of records.
5. Realism
Let’s face it: in today’s capitalist world, realism trumps idealism, and even an idealist has to demonstrate that he or she has the toughness it takes to face the facts. Lists are based on realism—on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources. An idealist might say, “Hey, let’s keep all the début novels.” A realist says, “Only the fittest début novels can survive.” A periodic weeding out, in the form of lists, is one way to prove you aren’t soft.
Personally, I think the drive to demonstrate realism is behind most forms of human aggression, from bullying to genocide (genocidal maniacs: famous for their love of lists). Against the threat of a real or speculative scarcity, people have to prove they’re tough by deciding which part of the population can be dispensed with. Lists do the same thing, only about albums and movies.
6. Hoarding
Erich Fromm’s description of the hoarding personality contains all the hallmarks of list-making: “The hoarding person often shows a particular kind of faithfulness toward people and even toward memories. Their sentimentality makes the past appear as golden.… Another characteristic element in this attitude is pedantic orderliness. The hoarder … cannot endure things out of place and will automatically rearrange them.”
The hoarder is someone who wants to hold onto time—and isn’t there a little bit of hoarder in each of us? Lists, like collections, transform time (ethereal, immaterial) into concrete, discrete objects we can collect and gloat over. The holidays are a natural time for hoarding because they involve new toys, and also because it’s cold out.
7. Countdown
Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars, and songs like “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
8. Black magic
In many cultures, the act of counting is believed to attract the evil eye. (God punishing David for counting the Israelites might be a holdover from a more ancient superstition against counting people.) Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.
The original holiday season was the winter solstice, a time when cultures all over the northern hemisphere traditionally held desperate festivities, on the premise that they might not survive the next three months. Most famous is the Roman Saturnalia, marked by a reversal of the social order and by “wild orgies of lust and crime,” which probably once included human sacrifices (later replaced by the exchange of dolls and the consumption of human-shaped biscuits). To this day, more Americans die on Christmas than on any other day of the year. It stands to reason that we commemorate this holiday as the Romans did: by pushing the envelope, tempting fate, taking names and numbers.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
