Well, the tinsel is being put away, lights are being torn down, eggnog hangovers are being nursed, and entire legions of families are sitting around the table, eating breakfast in awkward silence after the drunken revelations from the night before. Yes, it’s another Christmas gone. And as we burn the mistletoe and desperately try to remember the name of that guy at our high school reunion who said he was a lawyer, it’s a good time to contemplate and reflect on this holiday in a style befitting our snarky, meta-textual, information age culture: a critical review.

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As a holiday, Christmas is filled with quite a bit of promise and marketing bluster. Indeed, given the blitz of a marketing campaign that Christmas has been given, it’s doubtful that any holiday at all could have lived up to the hype.

Even with that in mind, it’s truly hard to say that Christmas is a superior holiday. Let’s take a look at one of its main celebrations: the idea of “peace on Earth and good will towards men.” A lovely sentiment in theory, but what does Christmas really do to bring it about?

It’s answer: go out and by everybody you know presents. Which really is not a bad idea, in theory. I’m certainly less inclined to kill or maim someone who gives me free stuff. In fact, there’s even a word for this type of thing: tribute. Yes, in it’s pursuit of “peace on Earth,” the traditions of Christmas assume that everybody is a cold-blooded killer unless they are placated with an annual gift tribute. Not the most flattering picture of the human race. But it is bracingly cynical, and you have to give Christmas a point for that.

Another inevitable aspect of the Christmas season is its emphasis on winter. Yes, winter. A time of sadness and pretentious pondering of one’s own mortality. A time of ice and horrible car accidents. A time when little children are deprived of outside recess even when the snow is begging to be sledded on.

This is the season that Christmas exhorts as a “wonderland of snow.” A time of hypothermia, traffic accidents, frostbite, and death. Nice try, Christmas, but this is a difficult proposition to swallow.

This is not to say that all of the promises of Christmas are bad. Here’s one place where Christmas traditionally gets overlooked: food. Yes, Christmas is usually overshadowed by Thanksgiving in the feast department, but there are several ways in which it is equal to, if not superior than, Thanksgiving.

First off: Christmas cookies. I don’t know who started the idea that Christmas should be a time of baking a bunch of delicious cookies and then giving them away for free, but that person deserves a Nobel prize. Snickerdoodles, iced sugar cookies, peanut brittle, peppermint bark, those peanut butter cookies with the Hershey’s kisses in the middle–they’re all good, and the cookie exchange is one aspect of Christmas well worth celebrating.

Another part of the traditional Christmas feast (at least in America) is the tradition of the Christmas ham. While this almost certainly does not have its origins in Jesus Christ’s lifting of the restrictive Mosaic dietary laws, I like to think that it does. At any rate, regardless of the reasons, the Christmas ham is definitely something to look forward to every Christmas.

Now, not all Christmas holiday traditions are worthwhile. Egg nog, for example, is high on my list of things that should never, ever, ever be drunk. Ever. But the Christmas season does traditionally come with special blends of various types of foodstuffs, such as coffee, cocoa, and even tobaccos, that heighten the aromatic nature of the holidays by being suggestive of peppermint, holly, and other nice scents of the season. These things are generally worth sticking around for.

Other Christmas traditions are hit or miss. Most renditions of Christmas carols, for example, should be drug out onto the street and shot. But occasionally you’ll get some really great gems of songs that truly bring out some of the traditional Christmas emotions. (I am, for example, rather disturbingly fond of the Bing Crosby/David Bowie rendition of “The Little Drummer Boy.”)

One Christmas tradition that really does impact my ability to realize good will towards men is the tradition of putting up Christmas lights on one’s house. This is something that really, should only be done if you have proven to have a high level of taste. Most house decorations are not only tacky, but display such poor understanding of illumination and color that one shudders to think of what such people actually wear every day. For example, blinking lights: no. Just, no. They look stupid. But if you’re going to have blinking lights, for the love of Baby Jesus have them all blink the same way. Also, the lights that hang down from your gutters don’t look like icicles. They look like you don’t know how to hang your lights properly.

Overall, it’s fair to say that Christmas definitely doesn’t live up the the marketing agenda. (How can it be the most wonderful time of the year when you’re stuck in a mall parking lot desperately looking to find someone who’s nice enough to loan you jumper cables because your battery froze?) But despite not living up to the hype, Christmas is definitely a solid holiday. It has good food in the form of cookies and ham. It has a subtle cynicism in its tradition of gift-giving. And, on rare occasion, it even has some good tunes. It’s not as good as Halloween or Thanksgiving, but it’s definitely up there on the Holiday scale.