Write Your Life with Tarot — Five of Pentacles

Everyone's (least) favorite card under Capitalism & no one's favorite Christmas present.

** You’re Invited! On Tuesday, December 31, at 11:30am CT, I’m hosting a gathering to guide us through Tarot pulls for the year ahead. We’ll pull theme cards, identify our personal cards of the year, and pull cards for each month of 2025, doing some creative play and dropping supportive breadcrumbs for our Future Selves. If you’re not already a member of the Creative Magic Collective, register here for $11. And if you’re desiring more creative and magical community — rich with support for your creative practice, your Tarot practice, and your explorations of magic, ritual, and divination, doors to the Collective are open! Learn more here!

I intended and hoped to share this post earlier in the month — if I wait too long, they smoosh against the Tarot-scopes (coming soon). I considered delaying until next month with the holidays here, but I’d rather follow through with my intention for now (and share prompts monthly). It feels interesting now to write about Five of Pentacles, a card of lack and need, in the midst of this lavish holiday.

Five of Pentacles from the Smith-Waite Tarot deck. Two barefoot figures in tattered clothes trudge through the snow outside what appears to be a warmly lit church. A Christmas gone very very wrong.

I’ll go ahead and say I’m not very into Christmas anymore. There are still things I enjoy about it (including the aesthetics, though overexposure sorta undermines the whole thing). But I think I grew tired of the performance of Christmas, the expense of Christmas, the compulsory nature of Christmas. (It’s also been overshadowing my birthday for almost 46 years, so I have personal beef.)

This supposedly very spiritual holiday honoring the birth of Jesus mostly seems to me a Holy Day of Worship at the Church of Capitalism — spend money on gifts, spend money on travel, spend money on decorations, spend your already rare free time cooking, cleaning, and wrapping presents to produce joy for everyone around you while the men mostly watch football and fail to notice the massive amounts of labor required to produce a Christmas.

I grew up religion-less (with lots of Christian ancestry), but as I learned more about Christianity’s appropriation and erasure of pagan winter festivals and practices, the sham became harder to unsee. Also, the whole myth-making for children around Santa Claus, only to reveal you’ve been lying to them for years, then nevertheless continue the illusion of Santa — out of guilt? Like, it seems insane. Let’s commit to the narrative, people!

The lazy river delivers us all to Christmas. (New Yorker cartoon by Tom Chitty.)

I don’t begrudge anyone who celebrates Christmas, despite how I sound. I get it! It’s charming. And I hope you had a really nice one, if you celebrate, with your own creative spin on the holiday that feels really good to you. I still get slightly enchanted myself — there’s a Christmas tree up in my home (though I didn’t put it there), and we did exchange some gifts (though I didn’t organize that), and I have watched 1.75 Christmas movies this year, a musical even (I take full responsibility for this last one).