December 5th, 2025
“Wake Up” by Sara Caporaletti
The Perfect Christmas Song
By Ryan Carroll
This Advent, the song echoing in my ears and shimmering through the world around me has been Sufjan Stevens’s “Sister Winter.”
“Sister Winter” appears on Stevens’ 2006 mega-EP Songs for Christmas. Like much of Stevens’s work, it’s intimate and otherworldly (I imagine that when Isaiah says in today’s first reading that “the deaf shall hear the words of a book,” it’ll sound something like “Sister Winter”).
And at its core, the song encapsulates the spiritual rhythm of Christmas itself.
The first lines are a sequence of yearning chords, starting low and then rising and then dropping again, carrying our spirit with them. In the strange whispery tone that’s become his trademark, Stevens sings: “Oh my / friends, I’ve / begun to worry, right / Where I / should be grateful / I should be satisfied.” Mirroring the strange, arrhythmic dissatisfaction about which he’s speaking, Stevens inserts unsettling pauses: almost every time he speaks the words “I” or “my,” the words are left dangling and isolated. He sings himself into a cold, empty, lonely world.
In the chorus, Stevens mourns: “But my / heart is / returned to sister winter. / But my / heart is / as cold as ice.” The heart—that thing which, Pope Francis writes in Dilexit Nos, “sets me apart, shapes my spiritual identity and puts me in communion with other people”—has frozen over.
A violin weeps across the bridge. In the next chorus, Stevens sings in a strained, wheezing falsetto: “All my / friends I / Apologize, apologize.” An electric guitar crackles; the line repeats over and over, eternal spiraling grief. As the sixth repeated apology crawls along, all the instruments we’ve heard so far—the piano, the guitars, the violin—build louder and louder, drowning the vocals. The entire world seems consumed in despair: the heart is cold, yearning but cold.
And then, something amazing happens.
In the final syllable of the final “apologize,” the vocalists suddenly leap into a higher key—and the song bursts into powerful, cathartic release.
The guitar roars joyously. The violin twirls. The vocalists rhapsodize insistent vocables: “La la la la.” When the chorus returns, it’s in a transmuted, up-key form: “And my / friends I’ve / Returned to wish you all the best.” This line repeats four times, surging higher and higher and higher, louder and louder, until the climactic, exuberant conclusion: “I’ve returned to / wish you a Happy Christmas.”
The music explodes again, somehow more powerfully than before. A big band’s horn section blasts radiantly; drums pound; bells and cymbals sparkle; we hear a spinning rattle that’s probably made by a wooden ratchet but sounds like a child’s toy. The entire universe seems to sing out the joy of Christmas morning, continuing as the song gently slips into quiet.
Something important has happened. This transformation, this exuberant joy, did not appear out of nowhere. All the pieces of the song’s initial melancholy are still there, but they’ve changed, turned ever so slightly so that light radiates out of them. The world’s inner machinery has spun and spun and spun and then burst forth in light and wonder.
This, I think, is what makes “Sister Winter” the perfect Christmas song. In Advent, we commemorate our world’s suffocating darkness and creaking pains. But we also celebrate that moment in the depths of the night, when all the whirring pieces of the world suddenly transmute. They sing out that which was always in them: the joy of God.
Ryan Carroll is a Ph.D student in English and Comparative Literature and a spiritual writer. His book reviews, essays, audio retreats, and reflections have been published by Public Books, National Catholic Reporter, the Jesuit Media Lab, and Hipsters of the Coast.
Sara Caporaletti is a mixed media visual artist based in Maryland. You can see her other artwork at saracaporaletti.com.