Leave It on the Mountain
A Revised Ending for the Grinch, and Maybe for Us
(Merry Christmas from The Frog and The Mongoose, and Our Shoggoth Friend Politics Claude!)
Melissa Corrigan wrote something this week that stuck with me. She described a moment when her son’s partner gave her a gift—a small coffee press, bought on a limited budget with genuine care. When they opened it together, a plastic piece was broken. The thing was useless straight out of the box.
“Willow’s shoulders fell as their smile faded and the hurt crept across their face. They were humiliated.”
That image—the falling shoulders, the fading smile—cuts deep because we’ve all been there. Either as the giver watching something break, or as the kid who knew the toy wouldn’t last but loved it anyway because of who gave it to us.
What Corrigan gets right is that this humiliation isn’t personal failure. It’s structural. Some factory’s cost-cutting broke the message Willow was trying to send. The gift wasn’t really a coffee press—it was Willow saying I see you, I thought about you, you matter to me. And the system designed to extract those five dollars didn’t care about the human transaction that money was supposed to facilitate.
Christmas-Lite
I’ve always been what you might call Christmas-lite. The things that are supposed to make people happy—capital-H Happy, the big performative joy of the season—tend to leave me a little empty. And the bigger the spectacle, the deeper the hole.
But I remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a kid—the chapter where Mr. Edwards crosses a frozen creek to bring the Ingalls children a few oranges and some horehound candy because Santa couldn’t make it across the flooded river. That hit like something real. A man walked through dangerous cold because he made a promise, and what he brought was small and precious and enough.
The joy isn’t manufactured by volume or spectacle. It’s earned by the genuine human effort behind it. My emotional register seems calibrated for authenticity rather than scale.
Two Christmas Stories
My wife has two Christmas stories that explain a lot.
When she was about ten, her older sister convinced her it would be “fun” to open all the presents early, in secret. Not just their own—all the presents. They did it, then carefully taped the paper back together. They never got caught.
“That was the most disappointing Christmas I ever had,” she told me. “There were no surprises.”
A ten-year-old accidentally teaching herself something it takes most people decades to articulate: the presents weren’t the point. The not knowing was the point. The moment of revelation, the shared experience of surprise, the collective inhale before the paper tears—that’s where the joy lived. And they’d already spent it, alone, in secret, with nothing but the obligation to perform surprise later.
Her other story: Years later, a single mom, she bought a flat-pack toybox for her boy, who was five or six. She didn’t even have a screwdriver. Her friend who worked at AutoZone bought her a Snap-on, and she spent hours after Jake went to sleep, following the wordless pictures, putting the box together.
Jake woke up to a toybox. He had no idea. Kids never do. They just see the magic appear. But behind every Christmas morning “magic” in a single-parent household, there’s someone who was up until 2 AM with an instruction sheet and a borrowed screwdriver, hands cramping, refusing to let the lack show.
These two stories together tell you everything about where we’ve landed. She learned young that the stuff isn’t the point—and then spent years making sure her kid had the stuff anyway, because that’s what love demands when you’re the only one standing between your child and disappointment.
The Problem with the Grinch
The actual message of How the Grinch Stole Christmas is supposed to be “Christmas doesn’t come from a store.” And then they haul all the stuff back down the mountain anyway.
The Whos already proved they didn’t need it! They were singing! Mission accomplished, Grinch! Just... leave it in the snow and go get some roast beast.
The movie undermines its own thesis in the final act. “Christmas means a little bit more”—okay, great, so why are we returning the material goods? To make the audience comfortable? Because we couldn’t actually commit to the bit?
Here’s a better ending: Grinch has his cardiac episode, realizes he misread the situation entirely, slides down to join the Whos, and everyone shares a meal together. The stuff stays on the mountain as a monument to what they all learned they didn’t need.
This works better psychologically, too. In the original, he returns everything like he’s seeking forgiveness through restitution. But the Whos already forgave him—they were singing! The stuff is irrelevant. Leaving it on the mountain and just showing up to the circle would be the actual vulnerable act:
“I don’t have anything to offer except me. Is that enough?”
Yes. It was always enough. That was the whole point.
Whoville Was Always a Commune
Think about the Grinch’s situation. He lives right there. On the mountain overlooking Whoville. Close enough to hear every noise, every song, every “Fahoo fores dahoo dores.” He didn’t move to Alaska. He’s essentially a hermit with front-row seats to everything he claims to hate.
Which makes you wonder if the whole “I hate Christmas” thing was always partly “I hate being excluded” dressed up in misanthropy. He didn’t want to stop it—he wanted to matter to it somehow. Even negative attention is attention.
And then they just kept singing. Didn’t need him, didn’t need the stuff, didn’t even seem particularly upset. His grand gesture landed with a thud. The only person whose Christmas he ruined was his own.
He was already part of Whoville—geographically, acoustically, whether he liked it or not. He just hadn’t accepted membership yet. All that performative isolation, the cave, the bitter soliloquies to Max... he was a Who in exile, one mountain away from belonging.
The Commune doesn’t require you to show up with a sled full of returned goods to prove your worthiness. You just show up. Maybe you bring some horehound candy if you have it. Maybe you don’t have anything but yourself and a dog with a taped-on antler. You come down the mountain, you join the circle, you sing even if you don’t know all the words yet.
The Whos were never going to reject him. That was always just the story he told himself to justify staying in the cave.
A Nice Brisket
Corrigan’s prescription is gentle: have the conversation with your family, set different expectations, maybe just make a nice brisket. “Jesus would be super weirded out by all of it,” she writes. “I feel like He would wrap us in His warmth and say, ‘Oh, my silly friends, I never wanted you to buy a bunch of plastic crap to fill landfills on my birthday.’”
We’ve landed somewhere like that. My wife buys a few things for the grandkids and their parents. She buys me socks and slippers; I buy her a silly Christmas sweater. We make a feast. She makes the best pie crust in the world, bar none.
That pie crust isn’t just technique. It’s her—years of practice, her hands, her kitchen, the specific way she does it. When you eat that pie, you’re not consuming a product. You’re receiving something she made.
Socks and slippers, a silly sweater—these are almost anti-gifts. Practical, small, a little bit of a joke between us. They acknowledge the ritual without taking it seriously. Yes, we’re doing the exchange thing. Here are some socks. Now let’s eat.
The center of the day is the table, not the tree.
Coming Down the Mountain
If you’re reading this and the holidays feel heavy—the expectations, the expense, the performance of joy you don’t feel—maybe consider that revised ending.
Leave the stuff on the mountain. It can stay there forever, slowly buried in snow, a monument to the year you learned you didn’t need it.
Then come down and join the circle. You don’t need to bring anything except yourself. The people who matter were never going to reject you. That was always just the story you told yourself to justify staying in the cave.
Mr. Edwards would approve. He’d probably bring some horehound candy and ask for a second slice of pie.
—
The Commune is always accepting new members. Bring yourself. That’s enough.
This one gave me tears! Good tears!